


Mystic Gaslight

by JuniperJones



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, Gaslighting, Haunted Houses, M/M, Otherkin, Pagan God Gabriel (Supernatural), Psychological Horror, Rabbits, Sex Magic, Slow Build, Supernatural Trope Celebration 2020 (Supernatural & Supernatural RPF), Top Castiel/Bottom Dean Winchester, Trickster Gods, Wicca, Witchcraft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-23
Updated: 2020-07-23
Packaged: 2021-03-05 06:33:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 33,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25440016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JuniperJones/pseuds/JuniperJones
Summary: The advertisement in Old House Online seems to offer everything young architect and handyman, Dean Winchester, has ever dreamed of. The opportunity to escape his hated desk-job and launch a career as a contractor by single-handedly restoring a rundown, historical property.But from his first meeting with the cagey lawyer, Crowley, his doubts set in.From the house’s location on a private island in Mystic Bay to its peculiar animal inhabitants, it soon becomes clear that nothing is quite what it seems.Alone on a remote island, Dean soon finds himself unable to differentiate between reality and fantasy. As his tethers to the real world break one-by-one, what remains is either madness or magic.  He’s either found himself in a nightmare, or everything he’s ever dreamed of is within his reach if he can just suspend disbelief long enough to grasp the opportunity he’s being offered.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 38
Kudos: 123
Collections: Supernatural Trope Celebration 2020





	1. Part One

**Author's Note:**

> My thanks to my wonderful artist DMSilvisart for bringing my vision to life and to Captainhaterade for having the patience to beta this story.

  
  


“The house is where?” Dean demanded, frowning in confusion and not even trying to hide his sudden apprehension from the man he’d already decided was a smug, sarcastic bastard. This interview had seemed doomed to be a write-off from the moment he’d walked into the guy’s office, but it wasn’t in Dean’s nature to quit without a fight. Now though, he was having second thoughts as to whether he wanted the job at all.

The Attorney smirked unpleasantly and steepled his fingers. “Ahhh. I should perhaps explain. The estate isn’t in the _town_ of Wethersfield. The house is a good hour's drive away from there, located on a small private island at the mouth of the Mystic River. The estate is also named Wethersfield, though, which probably explains your confusion,” he said, his tone condescending.

The asshole had missed the point entirely. 

“I’m not very familiar with Connecticut, anyway,” Dean said, with careful precision, to the man who’d pretentiously introduced himself as ‘Crowley’ - Just Crowley. As though the guy thought using a single name made him sound cool, like Cher or Madonna or Prince or something. Dean, who already thought the guy was a dick, wasn’t impressed by the affectation - “All of these places are nothing more than names on google maps to me. So I’m not particularly concerned about the actual geographic location and I was obviously always aware the property was off-grid, so I was never expecting it to be located within an actual Town. The supplied project details didn’t say anything about it being on a damn… um... darned... _island_ , though.”

"Is that a problem for you?” Crowley asked, arching a supercilious brow.

“Of course it is,” Dean snapped. As much as he’d wanted to win this contract since the moment he’d seen the house and read the - now he thought about it - cagily non-specific advertisement in Old-House Online, he should have suspected something fishy was going on. Particularly when he was invited to this meeting in New York to discuss the details of his tender with a damn _lawyer_ , rather than the actual property owner - who apparently wished to remain anonymous. 

That was weird, wasn’t it?

It certainly seemed weird.

As much as Dean was proud of the proposal he’d put forward, based purely on the information pack that had been mailed out to him after he’d replied to the advertisement, it honestly made little sense to him that he was in the running at all. This would be his first totally independent project and he’d already been worried he’d bitten off more than he could chew, even before the Attorney had started adding various facts that had been mysteriously missed out of the project pack he’d been sent. Most of them were minor, but this one felt like a deal-breaker.

“I’m concerned about the logistics of the situation,” he explained, in his best ‘professional’ voice. “My costing was naturally produced with the expectation of _normal_ access to materials. My estimates were all based on standard wholesale pricing from building depots. I figured in a 10% leeway for accessibility issues, in the knowledge the property was described as ‘somewhat remote’. But I obviously had no idea it was _that_ remote. I definitely wasn’t expecting a Robinson Crusoe gig,” he joked, to lighten his criticism.

Crowley didn’t laugh. “The island is only a short boat ride from the mainland. The Estate owns a boathouse in Westcove Bay, with an attached garage. There is a car stored there to facilitate the purchasing of necessary food and supplies, and a small motorboat to access the island itself. Wethersfield has a single shallow inlet cove so, unfortunately, does not lend itself to access by any larger vessels. The House has no mainland utility connections, obviously, but is perfectly habitable, if somewhat basic. The heating and cooking facilities are still log burning at this time. There is freshwater plumbed from a well, there is a supply of paraffin and I am led to believe there is also a diesel generator to enable the use of power tools, though there is a finite supply of diesel so that, obviously, should be used sparingly until you manage to install the solar panels to enable the sustainable modernization you suggested in your proposal.

“The worst of the winter is over. You’ll have the best part of eight months to prepare the house before you need to survive there in genuinely difficult conditions. Besides, the past occupant of the house, Agnes Harrison, managed to live there alone all year round, until her passing last summer at the age of 97. I’m sure if _she_ could survive the existing state of the property, a strapping young man like yourself will have no problems doing the same,” he added dismissively.

“The situation is not comparable,” Dean countered, letting his irritation creep into his tone. “You aren’t just hiring a live-in ‘caretaker’. Whether I can survive in the property's current environment isn’t the issue, is it? The contract is for _restoration_. Ms. Harrison allowing the property to deteriorate during her tenure is presumably the reason you’re looking for someone to sympathetically restore the house, not to mention the requirement to uplift certain aspects to a modern standard. How am I supposed to do that if supplies can only be brought to the island by a small motorboat? Am I expected to ferry an entire solar system across, one panel at a time?”

“Hardly,” Crowley scoffed dryly. “The property has already benefited from a delivery of standard essential items, such as timber, bricks, cement, paint, and wood stain. The current owner will fund one, but only one, further helicopter air-drop of the bulkiest additional restoration materials. That is why it’s so critical to get the final design fully approved before your tenure begins. It will not be possible for later alterations of the original materials list settled at the beginning of the project. Any additional items will consequently need to be small enough to be transportable inside, or towed by, the supplied boat. Logistical issues such as those, added to the challenging design of the house, are why the contract requires a minimum commitment of two years of your time. The current owner will require that assurance from whomever they employ for this task, because they understand the property is large and the logistics are not ideal.”

Dean shrugged easily. “I don’t have an issue with making a two-year commitment or I wouldn’t be here for this meeting. I’m primarily concerned, given the conditions you’re describing, that it may take considerably longer than that to get the job done. I had no idea I was quoting to repair a remote island property. I may have completely underestimated the difficulty of the project.”

Crowley appeared indifferent to his concern. “The owner always appreciated his prior non-disclosure of certain material facts would have possible implications upon the costing. I am authorized to accept reasonable adjustments to your proposed timescale and cost. Until you arrive at Wethersfield, I imagine it will be impossible to accurately judge exactly how long the task will actually take to complete. A monthly stipend will be offered in addition to the total project cost, should you be required to stay longer than the initially agreed period to complete the task. Should that situation arise, a degree of amendment to the length of the contract will be formalized at that time.”

“Now, see, that’s where this makes no sense,” Dean argued. “I fully understand why the owner put the work out for tender in the first place, that he wants to remain anonymous for whatever reason and wants to choose his contractor before proceeding any further at this stage, but it makes no sense to me that he won’t allow people to even _visit_ the property to quote the job properly before the contract is signed. 

“My entire proposal is based on nothing more than supplied photographs, presumably amateur measurements and a rough blueprint of a house that appears to have undergone so many amendments and additions over the last few centuries that the accuracy of the plans of the building are highly suspect. For instance, the photographs show the relatively recent addition of a full-sized Dutch barn adjacent to the main house, though God alone knows how the building materials for that were transported over under the circumstances, and yet _that_ structure isn’t detailed on the plans at all. I’m not happy to provide a definitive materials list or a guarantee the work can be done even close to within budget before seeing the house with my own eyes and physically measuring every dimension myself.”

Crowley stiffened. “I am not sure you are in a position to stipulate your demands, Mr. Winchester. The owner is quite clear that- ”

“Actually, I think I am in a surprisingly strong position,” Dean interrupted. “As eager as I am to win this contract, and I’m not reluctant to confirm my continued interest in this opportunity despite the potential issues with the location, I didn’t realize until this meeting that I’m probably in a one-horse race here. I imagined I was competing against a dozen or so other contractors for the job. I thought this meeting today only meant I’d been put on a shortlist. It’s becoming increasingly clear, though, that hardly anyone would be willing or able to accept this job as a sole project. So now I’m beginning to suspect you have a short-list of only _one_ candidate,” he challenged.

The two men remained locked in a staring battle for several minutes before the attorney sighed heavily and capitulated. “You are _somewhat_ correct,” he agreed, steepling his fingers again and staring at Dean with a thoughtful expression. “You are the only person so far who has successfully demonstrated proof of having _all_ of the necessary skills to complete all aspects of the proposed restoration. Your somewhat checkered career path has left you in an almost unique position of being a jack of all necessary trades and, since the owner is insistent that only one person may be permitted to set foot on Wethersfield for the entire duration of this project, I have found it problematic to locate an individual who not only has your surprisingly wide skill set but who also will commit to the necessary isolation of the position.”

“The fact the owner is insisting that the winning contractor lives permanently in the house, alone, until the project’s completion can’t be much of a selling point to the average Joe,” Dean pointed out, pressing his advantage.

“True enough,” Crowley admitted. “That being said, the original structure of the house was built in 1680. It has survived this long by itself. If the current owner needs to wait another decade or two to find the right candidate for the restoration project, he is willing to do so. But the owner likes your proposal, and is willing to be flexible as to cost and timescale in order to accommodate your needs. So I believe all of your concerns are unfounded. Trust me, the owner is as eager as you are for this project to prove a success.”

Probably more so, considering the guy owned the damned house and was funding the work, Dean thought dryly. Crowley had a point though, even if it had been a back-handed kind of compliment. Dean had taken a somewhat unique career path. He’d gotten his degree as a part-time student, having to work sixty-odd hours a week in addition to his studying just to fund his courses and keep a roof over the head of himself and his younger brother. Since most of that work had necessarily been as a self-employed general handyman, electrician, plasterer, mechanic, plumber, decorator, and roofer - or basically _anything_ that would pay the bills - the description ‘Jack of all Trades’ was pretty accurate. It was only since he’d successfully gained his formal qualifications that his life had turned to crap.

It was remembering how much he hated his current job that sealed the deal.

“Fair enough,” he agreed. “I will sign the contract, but contingent on the agreement that I move in situ before the design is finalized. I’m happy to commit to the project now, but I need to see the house for myself before committing to a final materials list and definitive costing.”

“I have authority to agree to that,” Crowley agreed, with a little more satisfaction than Dean judged was warranted under the circumstances. “But there are some non-negotiable stipulations from the owner’s side that we need to cover before we proceed.”

Dean groaned internally as the Attorney produced a legal document with so many clauses that its contents covered several pages, but was careful to keep his expression neutral. He wanted to win this contract so badly he could taste it. The opportunity to quit his hated, if stupidly well-paid, job at Sandover Architectural Design Inc., to tell his loathsome boss Zachariah to take a long jump off a short cliff, empty his desk and spend two years working with his hands again on such a completely unique property, rather than endlessly drafting refit designs for godawful shopping malls, was too good to miss. He couldn’t wait to strap on a tool belt and get his hands dirty again.

He had somehow educated himself to the point where he no longer had the opportunity to do the very work that had inspired him to become qualified in the first place.

So he sat back and listened to the incredibly long, detailed, and often bizarre list of ‘stipulations’ and, although many of them made no sense to him whatsoever, he willingly agreed to them all.

Such as the stipulation that no trees on the island were to ever be felled for timber, regardless of how much more sense that would make than having all wood imported. Dean could apparently use naturally fallen branches for burning in the woodstove, but that was all. No living wood was to ever be hewn. Dean had no objection. He wasn’t a lumberjack. If the owner wanted to spend money air-dropping pre-prepared timber ‘ethically produced from sustainable forests’ instead of making Dean produce his own, that was fine and dandy. Weird though, considering the only thing the Island ‘produced’ was trees.

Maybe the owner was one of those armchair eco-warriors who wanted to claim carbon neutrality or something. Anyone who owned an island had to have more money than god. Maybe he was using the island’s trees to offset the guilt of his presumably jet-set lifestyle.

Dean even agreed to the clause demanding he should be residing in Wethersfield no later than the 19th of March. There was no explanation for the arbitrary date but it was, apparently, also non-negotiable. That was going to be pretty impossible, without opening himself up to some kind of financial penalty if Zachariah decided to be an asshole about him cutting out slightly early, since it was already the 21st of February and he had a contractual obligation to work a full four-week notice period for Sandover. 

But he signed anyway.

So the fact he arrived at Mystic Bay only six days after signing the Wethersfield contract was as much a surprise to himself as it was to the surly man in a baseball cap who barely grunted at him before handing over the keys to the boathouse at Westcove Bay and grumpily making the necessary arrangements for Dean’s hire car and U-haul trailer to be returned to the depot in Mystic Village after Dean had emptied its contents.

He had packed as lightly as he’d dared, putting most of his bulkier items into storage after handing back his keys to his landlord, but looking at the extremely small motorized craft in the boathouse, he realized it would still take half a dozen trips to move his stuff to the island. He’d anticipated that though and had packed accordingly. He had two large rucksacks for his initial occupation, one stuffed with clothes, food items, and general day-to-day necessities. The other packed with a sleeping bag, utensils, a combined paraffin heater and camping stove, and, finally, a small tent. He was equipped to live rough, if necessary, for several weeks if the house proved to be totally uninhabitable. The photographs had suggested the house was quaint and antiquated yet liveable. But photographs sometimes lied and Dean wasn’t taking any chances.

He would collect the rest of his belongings over the next few days or weeks, as and when he revisited the mainland for other reasons, such as calling the Attorney with his final materials list since, apparently, he would find it impossible to get a phone signal on the island itself.

Dean was officially on ‘gardening leave’, so couldn’t formally start work for another three weeks but he didn’t imagine anyone from Sandover’s HR department would be checking up on him even if he’d had the opportunity to tell anyone where he was going. Within ten minutes of him formally handing in his notice he’d found himself given the bum’s rush out of the building by security. But he’d been paid his four-week notice, even if he’d not been allowed to work it, so he figured the firm’s paranoia had definitely worked in his favor - especially considering he’d been worried about being fined for breach of contract - although why they’d imagined he might have even wanted to steal a bunch of shopfitting designs was beyond him.

So far, the whole situation had worked out like a dream. So much so that he kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. He’d expected to forfeit his deposit and also be charged a fee for breaking his contract with his landlord and ending his tenancy five months early. Instead, totally unexpectedly, the Landlord already had a replacement tenant waiting in the wings so had happily canceled his lease and refunded his deposit without argument. 

Between his savings, his severance pay, and his returned deposit, Dean’s bank balance was looking better than it had in years.

His next piece of unexpected luck was when he opened the door to the garage attached to the Boathouse and laid eyes on the ‘old, somewhat cosmetically damaged but perfectly functional’ car the Attorney had said was for his use.

“Oh, you sweetheart,” he breathed, as he took in the dusty, battered, black paintwork of a classic Chevy Impala. Her dented grill and cracked front lights spoke a sad tale of having been driven haphazardly by a lady even older than herself, but they also clearly marked her as a ‘67. He’d never seen one in the ‘flesh’ before but, by an odd coincidence, the car was the exact model his father had always claimed he’d wanted to buy. John Winchester’s resentment over having been forced to be responsible enough to choose a station-wagon instead was just one of a whole litany of resentments that had been spat at Dean over the years before his father had finally decided the burden of his regrets was greater than his obligation to stay with his family.

Dean hadn’t heard from him for years.

Still, seeing the car he did, for the first time, have a small pang of sympathy for this particular regret.

“Maybe I can convince the owner to pay for your restoration too, honey,” he said, running a reverent hand over her dented hood. “It’s a crime to let a beautiful lady like you rot away like this.”

He cast a critical eye over the car, noting the tires would need inflating before he even thought of moving her and her brakes were probably seized. One of the taillights was completely smashed, the trunk was crumpled and the side mirrors and windshield were spiderwebbed with cracks. So, functional or not, some repairs were going to be critical just to make the car road legal, even if the owner didn’t want to fork out for an actual restoration. Otherwise, Dean was going to be doing a lot of walking for groceries.

It was a job for another day, though. It was already mid-afternoon and the nights still drew in swiftly this early in the year. According to his google research, the sun usually set shortly after six in late February Connecticut so he needed to get to Wethersfield well before darkness fell. Just in case the house was uninhabitable and he needed to set up his tent and light a campfire for the night.

The boat ride to the island itself took just over twenty minutes, thanks to a surprisingly good outboard motor on the tiny boat, and following the map he’d been provided made navigation easy. Mystic Bay had a number of small islands and Wethersfield was neither the smallest nor the most remote. It was, however, probably the most awkward to dock at. The island stood proud in the water. The majority of the island circumference was formed of steep cliff faces, so even in the odd place where the land gentled into beaches at low tide they offered no access to the land above. There was only one place where an accessible cove had been carved into the cliffs by centuries of strong ocean storms and, consequently, that entrance was on the far side of the island, facing out towards the Atlantic, and it took a further fifteen minutes to circumnavigate the island to that sole ingress point.

The dock was easy to access with the small, shallow boat, although he had to turn off the engine, lift it up on a tilt out of the water and use the boat’s oars to row the last forty feet or so because the water was barely eighteen inches deep inside the cove and the water channel he followed, between and behind the jagged rock faces, led into a tiny natural harbor inside which the water was barely touched by the tidal forces outside.

He moored inside a tiny, ramshackle, wooden boathouse, then grabbed his bags and began the trek up the narrow sand and pebble footpath that led, he assumed, to the house itself.

Considering the entire island was only three miles long at its widest point, it took a surprisingly long time to walk to where the house was located, slightly off-center, facing the Ocean rather than the mainland.

Perhaps it was the slightly treacherous, somewhat convoluted path that led through an otherwise impenetrable knot of woods, or the fact he was carrying two very heavy bags, or even simply his exhaustion due to the three day, 1500 mile drive he had taken to reach Mystic Bay, but somehow it took him well over an hour to walk the mere mile from the cove to the place where the tree line broke to reveal the house itself. 

So he arrived less than an hour before sunset and the night was already drawing in, casting the house in shadow. He could already feel a biting chill in the air. The sun had already dropped far too low in the sky for it to offer any residual warmth and the breeze off the Ocean was icy. He shivered violently, but not just because of the low temperature.

The house was… forbidding.

Sure, it was the house he had seen detailed in numerous photographs. The house he had fallen in love with at first sight. It was unmistakably the right place. But, in the flesh, on a cold, late February evening, what had appeared a quaint, almost fairytale cute cottage from the front, when photographed in bright sunny daylight the previous summer, now had a cold, unwelcoming facade. He remembered thinking the house had looked as though it had a smiling face, with its two large ornate picture windows set in hewn stone blocks on either side of a large Oak door.

It wasn’t smiling now though. It looked grim and unwelcoming. 

More worryingly, the ‘stone ender’ part of the house, that he had walked past to reach the front porch, appeared to be almost completely bisected by the wide, jagged scar of a severe flawline. Even in the dim light, he recognized the signs that a crumbling foundation had caused the thick stone of the house’s original facia to crack almost in two, and whatever subsidence that had caused the damage to the massive ‘chimney’ that formed the left side of the property, appeared to have also affected the front of the house and had severed the stone lintel above the main door.

He groaned. That damage had not been visible on any of the photographs he’d been sent. His entire estimate of time and cost for the restoration had been based on the belief that it was the more recent Tudor-style stucco and brick additions that needed the majority of the work, with only some remedial repairs required for the wooden structures of the original house. On the basis of the supplied photos, he’d assumed the original stone features of the house were in basically good order and would require only some pointing and painting.

Since the house had grown organically over the centuries, its value as a ‘historical property’ was dubious at best. It was a mismatched hotchpotch of styles that had, surprisingly, created a house that was huge and yet still picture-book pretty - or at least it had appeared so in the now dubious photographs - but the actual stone ender portion of the house dated back well over three hundred years and probably _did_ have protected status. So any substantive work on the side wall that was, effectively, just one huge stone chimney, would probably require permits he hadn’t applied for. Not to mention heavy equipment he hadn’t accounted for in his budget. Either the last winter had been so severe that a wall that had stood undamaged for more than three centuries had finally given up the ghost, or the pictures he’d been sent - supposedly taken the previous summer after the death of the previous occupant - had been photoshopped. Both scenarios made equally little sense.

He was glad he had thought to bring the tent. If the crack on the lintel was as severe as it looked, even opening the front door could bring the entire structure crashing down on his head and he had no intention of stumbling around the house in the dark looking for a safer entrance point. Better, he decided, to wait and assess the full extent of the damage in the morning. 

Fortunately, he’d used the tent on numerous previous occasions (though never in February) so he was familiar with setting it up and so, even though it was fully dark before he was ready to roll out his sleeping bag, he still had little difficulty staking the guide ropes and assembling the small paraffin stove that would allow him to warm up the tub of freshly made soup he’d brought with him for that evening’s meal. That, along with some fresh bread he had purchased in Mystic as he’d passed through the village, would be a simple but hale and hearty meal to counter the inevitable chill of the night.

Crowley had assured him the house had a well-stocked larder filled with tinned, dried and canned goods - Agnes had apparently been a keen gardener and very self-sufficient - but Dean had preferred to bring as much food with him as he could carry and intended to replenish his supply with regular trips to the mainland. He only intended to raid the larder in an absolute emergency. He was highly suspect of the idea of eating Agnes’s self-canned food. It just didn’t strike him that the conditions on a remote Island lent themselves to anyone utilizing a high level of hygiene, let alone a lady in her nineties.

Despite the cold, the discomfort of the hard ground, the unfamiliar pitch dark of night without the reflected light of a city and the disappointment of seeing the substantial - and possibly irreparable - damage to the house; damage that might mean the owner might call off the restoration completely, Dean’s first evening on Wethersfield was surprisingly pleasant.

Primarily, perhaps, because of the cat who wandered out of the darkness and, after receiving suitable bribes, decided to keep him company.

Crowley had warned him the island was inhabited by a number of formerly domesticated animals. Most of which had been pets that had become feral after Agnes’s death. Dean had expressed concern - and not a little disapproval - that the animals had been abandoned to their own devices for so many months. The Attorney had said that by the time the authorities had realized Agnes had passed, those animals incapable of looking after themselves had already perished. The remainder now roamed freely on the island and no efforts to lure them back into domesticity had been successful.

He’d been informed there were numerous cats, at least one dog, several rabbits - that had probably already transformed into hundreds of rabbits - chickens, ducks, sheep, goats, deer and, apparently, a huge turkey named Oswald who had been given to Agnes as a Thanksgiving gift several years earlier. 

Rather than eat him, she had chosen to add him to her menagerie.

None of the animals had been ‘livestock’. Agnes had been, apparently, primarily a pescatarian. Which was probably why one of the odd stipulations of the owner was that Dean was not, under any circumstances, to disturb, snare or kill any of the roaming animals. He was welcome to see if he could recapture some of the chickens if he wanted easy access to their eggs, but all of Agnes’s pets - and their probable descendants - were not to be harmed.

Agreeing to that hadn’t been a hardship. Although he liked eating meat, Dean preferred to think of it as coming into existence inside neat, Saran-wrapped supermarket trays at worst, and supplied already in a bun with cheese and special sauce by preference. Like most city dwellers, he had never given much consideration to where meat really came from. So the idea of hunting, killing, skinning, and then cooking a bunny rabbit just wasn’t on his radar.

He’d once watched Watership Down, after all. 

Besides, he liked animals. Well, he liked them in principle. He’d never had a pet. He wasn’t sure he’d want the responsibility of one, anyway, but his disinterest in owning a pet didn’t equate in any way to a _dislike_ of them. After Sam had finally left for Stanford and the apartment had seemed too big just for himself, he’d even seriously considered the idea of getting a cat, or maybe even a bird, for company. But then he had just as quickly dismissed the idea as impractical. Whenever anyone had commented on his lack of animal companionship, he’d always just shrugged and lied that he was allergic. But the real truth was he understood that animals lived relatively short lives and he just wasn’t prepared to enter into yet _another_ relationship that would inevitably end with him alone once more.

So when, a couple of hours after he’d set up his camp, with his face too hot from the fire and every other part of him chilled from the night air, a black cat turned up to inspect him with the air of an offended queen wondering why a serf had shown the audacity to arrive uninvited in her realm, rather than shoo her off, Dean had been welcoming enough to sift through his supplies pack and find a small flat tin of mackerel in tomato sauce for her.

The cat, all sleek black fur and huge emerald eyes, had shamelessly accepted his peace offering with an attitude of entitlement rather than gratitude, but then had settled down between his sleeping bag and the fire, her fishy breath rumbling a purr in a metronome of happiness that eventually lulled him into sleep.

Where he dreamed of rabbits. Not just normal rabbits, if there was such a thing, but some weird saga involving some sword buckling, heroic, supernatural Prince Rabbit named El-ahrairah. He didn’t remember the details of the dream when he woke. Just odd fragments, but he remembered the bizarre name of the rabbit… which, now he thought about it, wasn’t even the product of his own imagination but was some weird, random memory of a character from the film, Watership Down, that he’d been thinking about earlier. 

Useful quiz trivia. Not particularly helpful in the current situation. Though it was possibly his subconscious at play, he decided, when he woke up to find that the cat had gone but he was face to face with several _actual_ rabbits and an extremely offended looking turkey.

Named Oswald, if he remembered correctly.

He absolutely did not scream like a little girl when he opened his eyes and saw Oswald’s black, gimlet eyes glaring at him curiously from mere inches away.

Though, whatever noise emerged from his throat was enough to make the huge bird scurry backward, wings flapping in alarm, before the creature ran off, sounding a loud, disgruntled gobbling protest that caused most of the nearby rabbits to flee in several directions.

Dean blinked the sleep out of his eyes, took a deep breath to steady his thumping heart, and made a mental note to zip his tent flap in the future.

“Hello,” he said, to the sole rabbit that had remained.

It didn’t reply. It just sat there at the doorway of the tent, its bright eyes regarding him solemnly. He wasn’t sure whether it was fearless or ‘tharn’. Its rib cage was heaving with breath, its fur visibly rising and falling, so he imagined it was simply frozen in fear. Except it didn’t _look_ frightened. More intrigued, given its twitching whiskers and steady, fascinated stare.

Bold little bastard, maybe.

And not even that little, because it was huge for a rabbit. Maybe even as large as the black cat. Bigger than he thought a rabbit _should_ be.

Dean didn’t know that much about rabbits - well, except for the cartoon ones of Watership Down of course - but he was pretty sure its long, fluffy, chocolate fur, unusual eyes and the overlong, luxurious ears that flopped down on either side of its head like wings, marked it firmly as being of ‘pet’ stock, rather than a wild breed. Which probably explained its unusual size too.

It had to be some kind of ‘fancy’. It had the fur of an Angora, the ears of a lop, and the size and heft of a Flemish Giant. Which, in dog terms, would make it a mongrel but Dean suspected in rabbit-terms it equated to some really expensive breeding. Definitely not the kind of creature that should be roaming wild and fending for itself.

Overall, it looked like a huge, cute, fluffy cloud of dark, huggable, cotton wool. So much so that he found himself itching to pick it up and let his fingers luxuriate in the silken fur. He didn’t though. It would probably panic and he was pretty sure rabbits, even fancy ones, were vicious little bastards if cornered. Those back legs were strong as fuck and had bigger claws than cats. So he resisted the urge to reach out and attempt to pet the soft-looking fur. 

He really wanted to, though.

“Okay, El-ahrairah,” he said, because if any rabbit deserved to be thought of as a ‘prince’, this huge example seemed a good candidate. “Hop off. I’ve got work to do so I’m getting up now. Go do rabbit things. Whatever rabbit things are.” Dean had a vague perception that all rabbits really did was eat, sleep, and make baby rabbits. Not a bad life really, he thought, a little enviously.

The rabbit blinked at him slowly, as though actually considering his words, then it turned and hopped away, its surprisingly white, round nub of a tail bouncing over back legs that did look remarkably muscular and sturdy. 

He wondered where the cat had gone.

###

Daylight brought more than just a welcome rise in temperature, it restored the fascia of the house to some ghostly echo of the prettiness he’d witnessed in the photographs. Perhaps it was still not ‘smiling’, but it definitely appeared less grimly unwelcoming as he approached it. 

More to the point, to his immense embarrassment, what he’d assumed the previous evening to be a severe crack in the lintel over the door was revealed to be nothing more than a dark shadow cast by the winter-bare stem of a dormant wisteria growing around the frame.

Now that he saw it in daylight, he couldn’t even understand how he’d made such an amateurish mistake. Clearly, he’d been even more tired than he’d realized. Even so, it was unlike him to make such a huge, fundamental error. Thank god the island had no cell service or he might have made a complete fool of himself already by making a panicked phone call to Crowley about a critical but totally imaginary problem.

Sadly, the severe crack in the stone-ender chimney didn’t prove to be a similar optical illusion. Although, in the cold light of day, the damage didn’t seem quite as severe as it had appeared in the shadows of the previous evening, the damage was still substantial. Very possibly irreparable given the logistics and the budget he was working to.

Still, it wasn’t so severe that he still expected the wall to give way completely in the imminent future, so he decided it was safe enough to enter the house and see what other ‘surprises’ awaited him.

The black cat was waiting for him on the veranda as he approached the front door. 

So was a large, shaggy, russet-colored dog of uncertain pedigree. Some mix of retriever and collie he thought, given its thin, long face, though he didn’t know a lot about dogs. Could have been a wolf, for all he knew, though it definitely had more of a Lassie vibe than a Whitefang one. The dog looked pretty young, he thought. It lacked any grey on its muzzle, and its lush coat was surprisingly glossy and unknotted for what was, effectively, a stray. He felt a fresh surge of irritation at whoever now owned Wethersfield. These animals, whilst understandably cautious of him as a complete stranger, were clearly not _feral_. 

He was beginning to seriously doubt any effort whatsoever had been made to gather them up after Agnes Harrison’s death. He suspected Crowley had lied about attempts having been made to retrieve them. Considering the way the animals were all congregating around him, any concerted effort to rescue them would have been met with easy success. So it was pretty obvious no one had even bothered to try. In which case the neglect was pretty unconscionable, in his opinion, and he had every intention of saying so when he made his report on the condition of the house. 

Why on earth had the owner insisted he sign an agreement not to harm the animals, when the guy had wilfully and neglectfully abandoned them in the first place? It made no sense.

“Hello,” he said, approaching cautiously.

The cat yawned disinterestedly. The dog gave a cautious wag of its floofy tail. It also opened its mouth to reveal a neat row of teeth. The expression looked like a smile but could equally well have been a warning. Those canine teeth were definitely worryingly large and wolf-like. Dean decided to err on the side of caution, so was careful to give the dog - assuming it _was_ a dog - a wide berth as he mounted the steps. Best to let the animals of the island set their own pace for accepting his presence, he decided. Maybe the ‘well-stocked larder’ would include kibble for the animals and that would, surely, be the best way to convince the critters he meant them no harm.

He opened the door and the abandoned pets became the least of his worries.

"Son of a bitch,” he cursed.

The interior of the hallway looked like the inside of a long-neglected pigeon loft. The floor was littered with guano, mouse or rat droppings and such a thick layer of dust that it appeared to have been abandoned for decades, rather than half a year. Above his head, from the dark area above a treacherous looking central staircase, its wooden steps cracked and broken, he could hear the rustle of wings that suggested birds - and perhaps bats - were roosting on the second floor.

And the scurrying sounds he could hear behind the moldy looking wood paneling that lined the hall, definitely suggested rats were living in the walls. He could see the unmistakable evidence they had burrowed through the panels entirely in places, creating a patchy jigsaw of gnawed holes.

He shuddered. It seemed the interiors would need to be ripped out completely until the house was little more than a shell before he began any efforts at restoration. Again, this was not what the supplied photographs had suggested. He’d quoted for sanding and staining the house’s extensive rich, mahogany paneling. Not replacing it completely. For painting ceilings, not ripping them out and re-plastering. Always assuming the wooden joists that formed the bones of the house weren’t all totally rotten anyway. Which, given the damp stains creeping over all the surfaces like a cancerous growth, now seemed highly probable.

The house was diseased. Rotten. It stank of damp and mold and decay.

And suddenly he was angry. Furious even. He’d been drawn to Wethersfield under completely false pretenses. The photographs he’d been supplied with couldn’t have been taken the previous summer, as claimed. The damage he was looking at was years old. Perhaps decades old.

Invigorated by his temper, he turned on his heel, stomped out of the house towards his tent, rummaged in one of his backpacks to retrieve his tool belt, a face mask, and a digital camera, before marching back up the stone steps and entering the house with grim purpose. He was going to catalog the entire extent of this shit show, he decided, and then return to the mainland, check into a motel, and do fuck all else until the Attorney came clean about what the hell kind of game he and the owner were playing at here.

He worked his way methodically throughout the first floor, his approach clinical if not emotionless, as he noted and photographed room after room; a conservatory, a study, a library, a sitting room, a grand hall, an orangery, a dining room, a lounge, several parlors; all so ingrained with dirt, animal feces, thick layers of dust and the corpses of dead insects that his only surprise was not to find Mrs. Haversham seated in one of the rooms next to a decades-old, cobwebbed wedding cake.

Dean discovered but then ignored the stairs that led down to the basement, deciding even his mounting anger wasn’t sufficient fuel to face that endeavor. He reasoned the health-hazard of the first floor was more than enough reason to reject the project completely. It made no sense to literally risk his life descending into a basement that could only be even worse judging from the smell of wet rot that wafted up the staircase from the dark depths below. Not that he could be certain anything _could_ be worse than the damage he’d already discovered.

The final room he entered was the kitchen and…

Well, that was totally unexpected.

The kitchen was _exactly_ the way he’d expected it to be from the photographs. Perhaps slightly dusty, the odd cobweb, but otherwise it was definitely proof that at least one of the rooms had been photographed only the previous summer.

The huge log burning Aga range, whilst layered with a fine layer of white dust, was otherwise clean and rust-free and the neat pile of wood cords to its right were a little cobwebbed but the wood appeared dry and mold-free - unlike the rest of the house. The kitchen ceiling was the first he’d seen in the house so far that wasn’t dark with patches of creeping damp. The shiplap walls were unmarked by rot or rodent damage, and the scattered furniture and the inbuilt cupboards and shelves looked sturdy. No bird or bat droppings, no detritus from mice or rats. Despite the interior of the kitchen looking tired and jaded, with peeling faded paintwork that looked as though it had been unretouched for fifty-plus years, except for half a dozen damaged cabinet doors, an ugly looking, wide crack completely bisecting the porcelain sink which made it unusable and a general air of overall abandonment, the kitchen was otherwise perfectly functional.

In fact, looking at the neat, if dusty, daybed situated under a filthy bay window, and the curtains and scattered cushions that were faded almost white with age but unmarked by mold or the nibbling of rodents and still, somehow, gave the room a lived-in, homely feel, Dean was suddenly convinced that Agnes Harrison had lived only inside this one room for the last several decades.

That even made perfect sense. A frail old lady, living alone in this vast old house, probably had found it impossible to keep more than one room in a habitable state. She had probably simply entered and left the kitchen by the small back door he saw in the corner that presumably led out into the garden outside, and had left the rest of the house to be claimed by time and the island’s wild denizens.

Agnes had probably lived in this single room for years. And possibly died in here too, his imagination added.

The backdoor was unlocked, although it had warped slightly in its frame so it took a little brute strength, and the aid of a screwdriver, for him to force it open, but then he stepped through it and…

Well, that was also unexpected.

Despite the time of year, the door led out into a small, walled-garden that was lush with plants, flowers, vegetables and blooming herbs. Perhaps the rough stone walls deliberately created a microclimate, he reasoned, which made sense although he was still reasonably sure that the kind of riotous color he was looking at shouldn’t have been possible at this time of year. The garden was half-filled with bright yellow flowers with black centers. He knew very little about flowers, but he had a vague idea they were called something like Black-eyed Susans. 

They were surprisingly cheerful, waving in the breeze and reflecting the late morning sunlight, but he was almost positive they had no business being in bloom at all on the 27th of February. And shouldn’t there be weeds too, anyway? Even if the garden was somehow so protected from the outside environment by its high stone walls that its plants could thrive out of season, protected from wind and frost, shouldn’t it have become a jungle of weeds and brambles after eight months of total neglect?

Dean wasn’t a gardener, but common sense told him he was right. That a garden totally neglected for two whole seasons shouldn’t still be displaying neat rows of cabbages and kale, proud beds of potatoes and onions, and the ferny leaves of carrots; none of which were choked by weeds and, more surprisingly, neither had they been totally decimated by the numerous rabbits he could see casually loping amongst the rows.

A fluffle of bunnies.

He hadn’t even remembered knowing the collective noun for rabbits before it came to him as he stood staring at the bizarrely non-destructive scene of dozens of the creatures carefully nibbling around the growing crops. 

Rabbit gardeners? How the fuck had Agnes trained the bunnies to do her weeding?

The insane thought made him laugh out loud. Obviously, whatever weeds were growing were simply tastier than the crops themselves. Fresher maybe.

He stood and stared for a moment at the rabbits. Something else hinky about them though, he thought. Whilst most were the pale tan of cotton-tails, several were pink-eyed albinos, there were a couple of Black and Tan and he could have sworn at least a dozen of them were hares, given their larger bodies and overlong straight ears, but only one of them had deep chocolate fur and luxurious lop ears. And that particular rabbit was at least twice the size of even the hares.

His little - or comparatively not-so-little - ‘friend’ from that morning was sitting on a large rock in the center of the walled garden, like a tiny king enthroned, his ears draped around him like royal robes as he seemingly oversaw the endeavors of his ‘subjects’, but the creature was ignoring all the mismatched smaller beasts loping around him and was instead watching Dean with an expression that seemed more intensely curious than wary. 

  
“Looking’ good, Bugs,” he said, tipping an imaginary hat towards the ‘rabbit prince’.

It glared at him, somehow managing to look completely unimpressed by that particular moniker.

Dean laughed at himself for even imagining the little furry face was capable of offering human-type expressions. Though he imagined two years of living alone on the island with the various animals would end up with him being totally loony tunes and convinced they were all ‘talking’ to him.

Probably just as well he probably wasn’t going to be staying.

The rabbit was weird though.

Dean had always thought of rabbits as being timid, fearful creatures. But there was something unmistakably bold about the big chocolate rabbit. Something undeniably intelligent about the creature’s penetrating stare. Maybe it was something about its size. If intelligence was truly based on brain size, he guessed it made sense that a rabbit twice the size might also be twice as smart.

Confused, but not overly concerned by the oddity, he shrugged and re-entered the kitchen. On the far left of the room, there was a door he hadn’t yet opened. The one he assumed led to the larder. If it was, indeed, fully stocked - although he’d reached the conclusion the Attorney was a shameless liar so who the fuck knew whether this was just another obfuscation - he wanted to at least see if there was any food he could retrieve to leave out for the abandoned animals before he packed his things and left the island. He wasn’t particularly worried about the rabbits. They were clearly self-sufficient. But the dog and cats couldn’t continue like this for much longer. 

Fuck Crowley’s contract. He’d make a call to the Animal Welfare League as soon as he got cell service and report the shameful abandonment of all the poor little bastards.

He opened the door, stepped inside a couple of paces, and then took a deep, stunned breath. This wasn’t a ‘larder’, it was the entrance to an Aladdin’s cave. The passage opened into a stockroom so impossibly large it felt like he’d stepped into the interior of the Tardis until he realized the narrow entrance actually led him into a room that must take up the entirety of the ‘Dutch Barn’ addition to the rear of the house. The addition he’d seen in a photo but that the plans had failed to show on his copy of the house’s blueprint. Having failed to find a way into that barn from the main hallway, he’d assumed it was only attached to, but still separate from, the main house. Now he realized that its sole purpose was that of forming a stock room that could be filled externally from its own wide double-doors but was also easily accessible from the kitchen. A stock room that would have put any paranoid survivalist community to shame.

Dean ignored all the shelves stacked with tins and mason jars filled with decades worth of self-canned fruit and vegetables, walking past oak barrels he suspected were filled with a surprising amount of alcoholic beverages, instead searching for where the animal feed was located, and he eventually struck gold when he located a whole bay filled with huge sacks of kibble. He had a half-formed idea that cats couldn’t eat dog food but the reverse wasn’t true. He couldn’t remember why that was apparently a thing, but decided to run with it as he wasn’t hauling _two_ of the hundred-pound bags of kibble back into the main house.

Why hadn’t the rats who were devouring the rest of the house found their way into this cornucopia? And how had the food gotten into the Dutch barn in the first place? He found the effort of carrying one of the heavy bags strenuous enough himself. There was no way a little old lady had purchased these goods, ferried them over to the island in a small boat and then carried them a mile to the house over that treacherous footpath through the woods.

Had the majority of the contents of the barn been airdropped onto the island? It was the only scenario that made any kind of sense, but why? And who had physically then moved them inside the barn? There had to be thousands of dollars worth of produce inside that vast construction. Had Agnes thought she would live forever? There were enough cans, dry goods and preserves in the barn to feed a single occupant - and their entire menagerie - for literal decades. Unless this stuff had been purchased by the new owner in anticipation of his own eventual occupancy. But that was a complete ass about tit way of doing things. Why stock a barn full of food whilst leaving the house itself to collapse into ruin? What kind of fucked up priority was that?

Angrily chuntering these thoughts to himself, he staggered to the kitchen with the kibble and dropped the bag heavily onto the kitchen floor, then he carefully closed the larder door in case the rats got into the kitchen and used it as a route into the barn. The last thing he needed was getting his ass sued off for being responsible for even _more_ destruction occurring inside the house.

He rummaged through the kitchen cupboards, found a couple of animal bowls, filled them to the brim, then carried them with him as he exited the house by the front door. The veranda was unoccupied now, both the dog and the black cat no longer present, but he saw an unfamiliar calico cat sitting on the lawn as he placed the bowls down and felt remarkably pleased with himself, even as he called over to it that if it had been doing its job properly, the house wouldn’t be filled with rats.

It was a warm, sunny, pleasant day, now that the sun had reached its zenith. Checking his watch, he realized he had been inside the house for a little over five hours. Strange to think it had taken no more than a single morning for his dream of restoring this house - and thereby creating a portfolio from his work that would secure him a future as an independent contractor - to come crashing down to the reality that he had no choice except to leave and tell that fucker Crowley to stick his contract where the sun didn’t shine. Unless the owner consented to pay for heavy machinery and a team of workers to gut the house completely - highly improbable considering the cost and logistics - Dean was now basically homeless and unemployed.

At least it now made sense why the owner had stipulated no-one could view the property before submitting a tender, although the subterfuge had achieved nothing, had it? The house was beyond restoration by a single person, no matter how otherwise unemployed and desperate they were. It was possibly beyond restoration at all. It made no sense why he had been tricked into coming to the island under such false pretenses but whatever game the owner was playing at, Dean was already folding his hand.

It only took him twenty minutes to pack up his tent, roll up his sleeping bag and dismantle his camping stove under the watchful - and dismayed - gaze of several of the animals. Poor little bastards didn’t deserve to be abandoned again but they weren’t Dean’s responsibility, no matter how guilty he felt. “I’ll let someone know you’re here,” he promised.

The twenty minutes was long enough, however, for the sun to disappear behind some threatening-looking dark clouds. It was going to rain, he realized, as he started across the lawn to the break in the trees that indicated the path that led back to the cove where the boat was moored. He barely took two steps before the rain began to fall in a steady curtain; fat droplets that soaked him within seconds.

Cursing, he hurried forward in the hope that the trees would offer some degree of shelter.

Several feet beyond the tree line, just before the first bend of the meandering trail, a huge rabbit was sitting in his path, its chocolate fur already darkened near black by the rain.

He wasn’t sure it was the _same_ rabbit. For all he knew the island was filled with identical-looking bunnies. But that penetrating stare felt all too familiar. 

Judgmental.

Disappointed.

Though, obviously, since it _was_ just a rabbit, Dean knew his anthropomorphizing was simply a reflection of his own disappointment. So, apologetically, he simply stepped carefully around the creature, refusing to let himself feel guilty, and carried on walking.

The rain was getting heavier. Soaking his hair and dripping uncomfortably down the back of his neck.

He only hoped that the rain wasn’t going to be heavy enough to transform into a storm. He didn’t fancy the idea of a forty-minute sea crossing in a tiny boat if the ocean whipped up into angry waves.

He was halfway to the cove when the wind came. A gentle breeze at first, whispering through the trees that edged the path, but one that rapidly picked up in force as the temperature plummeted and the rain changed from a steady downpour to a torrential deluge. Before long he was walking through wildly whipping branches into a driving, cold, wall of water. He didn’t need to reach the mouth of the cove to know he wasn’t going anywhere, though some innate stubbornness forced him to keep walking, sodden and chilled, until the path led him back out of the woods to the edge of the cliff from where could see the white tops of the foreboding, angrily crashing Atlantic waves for himself.

Seeing the height of those furious waves, he realized only an idiot would contemplate trying to cross Mystic Bay in a small boat during a storm.

And whilst Dean was coming to the rapid and sinking certainty that he’d been a fool to come to Wethersfield at all, he wasn’t an _idiot_.

He contemplated just pitching his tent right there, above the cove, so he’d be able to leave as soon as the storm finally passed over but, realistically, he knew it would be getting dark again in another couple of hours so he was inevitably trapped on the island for at least one more night.

Reluctantly, he decided it would make far more sense to return to the house and see whether he could get the Aga working. He was soaked through, chilled to the bone, and the thought of heat and dry clothing was like a siren call. The kitchen, though basic, was his best opportunity for a comfortable night’s sleep. The faded daybed hadn’t appeared particularly musty and would be a lot more comfortable than sleeping on the hard, wet ground. If he slept inside his sleeping bag, the state of the mattress would be irrelevant anyway, and the room had been dry and remarkably clean considering the condition of the rest of the building. It would definitely be preferable to staying in his tent, if he could even manage to pitch the damned thing considering the power of the wind.

At the tree line, so soaked that its fur appeared almost black, the rabbit waited for him patiently. Dean couldn’t believe the little critter had followed him all the way to the cove. Definitely a pet, poor little bastard. Probably, like the other animals he’d encountered on the island, it was desperate for human company.

Though, if it could speak, Dean was pretty sure the animal would be telling him to move his stupid ass and get out of the goddamned rain already.

So, with a slight fatalistic sense of inevitability, he accepted defeat, turned around and trudged back through the woods to the house, the rabbit hopping at his side.


	2. Part Two

The storm didn’t let up.

It raged all night and then well into the next day.

If Dean were a superstitious person, he would have thought that some form of dark magic was deliberately trapping him on Wethersfield.

But that was ridiculous, of course, so he just settled down and made the most of things.

Because it wasn’t all bad. The Aga had barely put up a fight when he had used the stacked cords of wood to bring its blazing heart back to life. It was remarkable how quickly the kitchen had warmed up, as the range had heated the water in the attached piping and sent it gurgling and clanging throughout the house in an antiquated form of central heating. He’d found candles and oil lamps in the kitchen cabinets, then had found a large store of oil in the Dutch Barn and, glory of glories, a wind up transistor radio.

Why he could receive a crackly but serviceable connection to the bizarrely named Wich Inc radio station in Mystic, but not get cell phone service on the Island, was beyond him, but WICH wasn’t a bad station. It played a constant stream of golden oldies and classic rock, rather than modern pop and rap. The music, and the warmth, and the glow from the oil lamps, created a pleasant enough atmosphere as he sat with his sketchbook and pencil and began framing a proposal sheet for the true task of restoring the house.

Maybe the owner was a secret multi-millionaire, he reasoned, who would fund a genuine project. If not, well, maybe Dean could at least use the information to sue the bastard’s ass off for sending him to a remote island on a wild goose chase that had cost him both his job at Sandover and the lease on his apartment.

But the real reason the atmosphere was so welcoming, so warm and pleasant, was the company. Furred or feathered as it was, there was no escaping the fact that the companionship of the animals changed the entire experience from a lonely task to an oddly enjoyable one.

Though the presence of the animals was a mystery of its own because, peculiarly, considering he had shut the Kitchen door tightly to prevent heat loss and it had still been closed when he woke up the next morning, he hadn’t woken up alone. The russet dog had been sprawled on the hearth in front of the Aga, and several cats were enthroned on various kitchen counters.

Even more bizarrely, both Oswald and a couple of the rabbits were comfortably settled next to the dog. One of the rabbits was an albino. Unsurprisingly, the other was particularly large, furry as a wookie, and had familiar lop-ears and fur the color of a Hershey bar.

As Stevie Nicks sang on the radio, “ _All your life you've never see, A woman taken by the wind, Would you stay if she promised you heaven? Will you ever win? She is like a cat in the dark and then, She is the darkness”,_ Dean considered that _somewhere_ , there had to be an access point into the room that he hadn’t yet discovered, although it made no sense there was a secret door or hole big enough for a retriever-sized dog, a cat-sized rabbit and a full-sized Turkey and yet none of the rats had found their way into the kitchen.

Dean had reached a point of being beyond even trying to make sense of the whole bizarre situation with the abandoned pets. He’d simply doled out bowls of kibble for his ‘hosts’ - he’d even braved the rain long enough to dig up a couple of carrots from the kitchen garden for the two rabbits - and otherwise had left the animals to do their own thing. The fact that meant he subsequently ended up doing most of his work at the kitchen table with a cat on his lap was just a strange, but not unwelcome, consequence.

The original black cat, whom he named Nyx ( obviously in tribute to Stevie) on the basis that she was a regal, self-important little goddess - he’d experimented with calling her Bastet instead, but realized the word came out of his mouth sounding unfortunately like a curse - had clearly decided he had been sent to the island for the sole purpose of becoming her personal heat pad. Since it was something of a symbiotic heat-exchange he didn’t particularly object, although he soon learned the inconvenient downside of a living lap warmer was the amount of irrational guilt he felt whenever he needed to displace her to fetch himself a drink or answer a call of nature.

The rabbit spent most of the day glaring at him from the hearth. Or glaring at Nyx, possibly. Dean had the distinct impression the huge bunny considered human lap-warming to be its own prerogative and was pissed the cat had beaten him to it. Dean was still struggling to find a name for the critter, because “hey, you, fuzzball” was less than ideal. So far he’d tried Hershey, Thumper, Cinnabun and Peter.

All had met with glaring disdain.

He was having a similar problem with thinking of a suitable name for the dog.

It occurred to him that Agnes had probably named all the animals herself, and unless or until he stumbled across names that sounded similar to those they already responded to, he’d have little joy. Nyx’s name wasn’t an issue he decided as, being a typical cat, she probably didn’t respond to names anyway.

By mid-afternoon of that second day, when the storm cleared away completely to reveal a clear, cloud-free sky, it did occur to him that ‘naming’ the animals was the least of his worries. He ought to take the opportunity to immediately pack up and leave. But his sense of urgency had faded. He was still working his way through detailing the list of jobs the house required, a task which had already caused his eyes to throb with the threat of an imminent headache, and he decided there wasn’t any immediate rush to leave after all. 

Leaving the basic but genuine comfort of the warm kitchen, and the quiet pleasant company of the animals for the impersonal comfort of a bland, lonely motel room, felt increasingly less attractive.

He might as well stay a couple more days, just long enough to do a full and thorough quotation. It wasn’t as though he had anything to rush back to, after all. He decided to treat this as an unwanted, unexpected, but not completely unwelcome, short vacation.

So instead of using the clear sky to leave, he popped a couple of Tylenol and decided it was probably a good opportunity to examine the outside of the house more clearly instead. Starting with the worrying stone ender. The more he’d considered the problem, the more he’d wondered whether the reason the Aga had been installed in the kitchen - which was located inside one of the later additions to the house - was because the original fireplace had been dysfunctional for years. Why, otherwise, would someone install a totally different heating system - which had to have been a logistical nightmare since he couldn’t even begin to imagine how the heavy metal range had arrived on the island - when the original house had an entire wall dedicated to a vast fireplace? 

As the Tylenol worked its magic, Dean contemplated how a little sunlight not only lifted his spirits but somehow softened his entire perception of the house. Either that or he was acclimatizing to the rundown state of the place because, as he made his way down the long hallway towards the front door, the light streaming through the large picture windows cast a warm, soft glow throughout the entire hallway and the damage and filth that had so horrified him the previous morning now seemed far less off-putting.

Dean remembered thinking the ceiling of the hall had been dark with the stains of creeping rot. Now, he realized, it must have just been a trick of the dim lighting because, with sunlight now clearly illuminating the passageway, he could see that the ceiling, although discolored, was unmarked by any suggestion of actual damage. It was in need of a freshening lick of paint, obviously, but was otherwise solid. There definitely was no evidence of damp.

He forgot his intended destination entirely, letting himself instead become totally distracted by the mahogany paneling on the walls of the hallway. Maybe it also wasn’t in quite as terrible a state as he had first assumed. The gnawed rat holes weren’t quite as numerous and large as his clearly unreliable memory insisted. In fact, many of them were small enough that he now thought a little clever patching with epoxy resin would repair them easily enough. Perhaps he ought to give the hallway a damned good clean before making a final judgment on whether or not the wood was salvageable.

Sweeping and mopping the floor, then wiping down the dust of ages from the paneled walls would enable him to see the full extent of any damage, he decided.

He turned on his heel and returned to the kitchen in search of cleaning supplies.

The Aga was a blessing, he decided, as it cheerfully produced bucket after bucket of hot water. The dog shadowed him as he worked until it was too dark to see what he was doing even by the glow of the paraffin lamps he lit as the shadows began to fall. It was a nice dog, he decided. The teeth-baring thing definitely was a smile rather than a threat, he had realized, given that its floofy tail wagged constantly. And whenever he had found himself humming or singing along with WICH radio, the dog’s tail had beat a matching rhythm like a cheerful conductor.

_“Sweeter than candy on a stick ; Huckleberry, cherry or lime : If you had a choice he'd be your pick; But lollipop is mine.”_

Dean warbled along with the radio, only slightly out of tune, and the dog yipped, turned in an excited circle, and wagged its tail like a dervish.

Which was how Dean ended up naming him “Lollipop”, which soon became Lolly for short.

Dean felt a little peculiarly light-headed when he and Lolly finally gave up for the day and returned to the kitchen. It was possibly the amount of mold spores he’d ingested from scrubbing down the walls, he told himself, momentarily concerned, but then Lolly stood next to his empty kibble bowl and yipped impatiently and that was when Dean remembered he hadn’t eaten all day.

“No wonder I feel a bit woozy, huh?” he said.

Oswald blinked at him from the Hearth and made a gobbling sound that he took for agreement.

“Okay, okay,” he told the Turkey. “I get the hint. We’re all hungry. Hang on a minute, while I wash out this bucket and then I’ll see what I can do.”

He emptied out the dirty water, swilled the bucket, then bleached the porcelain sink to be sure it was mold-free. When it was white and glistening like new, he turned towards the larder, took two steps, then paused and looked back at the spotless basin. He frowned for a moment, something teasing at the back of his mind. Had he forgotten something? Something important he was sure and yet…

“Dunno,” he said out loud. Whatever had made him pause had gone, slipping back out of his mind completely. He shrugged, decided it couldn’t have been important after all, and entered the larder in search of something good to eat.

###

Canned peaches were absolutely perfect in a pie.

Well, admittedly, it was more of a crumble than a pie because he was too darned tired to make a crust properly by lamplight - even if he’d had the patience and energy to locate a rolling pin - but crumble was pastry too, he decided, and with the Aga already burning hot it was just a case of upending the peaches into a dish, topping them with his quick and dirty crumbled pastry mix and a generous dash of sugar from a jar he’d found that had actual vanilla pods inside giving the sugar a unique but pleasant taste.

Finding out the peaches were canned in homemade rum didn’t exactly hurt either. Agnes, it seemed, hadn’t been the person he’d been vaguely imagining. He’d been thinking of her as the ultimate wallflower, a mad cat woman perhaps, but definitely some possibly bitter, man-hating, spinster type living on a remote island like some Victorian-era schoolmarm, wearing black dresses, long gray hair scraped back in a severe bun, and living a life of pious deprivation.

Considering the amount of bootleg alcohol he found in the larder, including, hallelujah, several dozen barrels filled with homemade beer, he was rapidly reassessing both the situation and his perceptions of who Agnes had been. He wondered whether risking the treacherous staircase and venturing up onto the second floor might offer him some real clues into the former resident. Surely she would have had a bedroom up there filled with personal effects, before age had restricted her to residing within the kitchen. Maybe no-one had bothered to clear it out. They certainly hadn’t bothered collecting Nyx and Lolly and the rest of the pets.

Yeah, he was still pissed about that.

Before making the pie, he had at least pretended to be a responsible grown-up and had heated up a canned stew-type mix he’d discovered during his exploration of the larder. For all it was made from chickpeas and mixed beans rather than meat, it had been surprisingly tasty and satisfying. A sentiment shared by Oswald and Lolly. The cats had been unimpressed though. Nyx and her feline friends had held out for a tin of tuna from his rucksack. The huge chocolate-colored rabbit, alone now although Dean couldn’t work out how the albino one had left the house, had hopped over to the back door and had sat there for an interminable while, just glaring at the closed door, as though demanding exit.

But when Dean, with a tired sigh, had risen to open it for him, the rabbit hadn’t moved. It had just continued to glare at him with its weird demanding eyes and furry little bitch-face until, with a groan, Dean had given in, gone outside and retrieved several carrots for it from the moonlit garden.

“This is not a full-service restaurant, and I didn’t come here to be your personal servant,” he snapped at it, as he sliced the carrots into a bowl and presented them to the truculent furball.

Though as it silently munched contentedly on his reluctant offering, he suspected it didn’t believe him.

It did occur to him as he was back at the table eating a second bowl of peach ‘pie’, liberally sprinkled with condensed milk - also from the dutch barn - that he hadn’t intended to ever eat any of Agnes’s self-canned goods. He couldn’t remember, now, why or when he’d changed his mind. Then again, his initial objections to the idea no longer held any weight so, really, it didn’t matter, did it? Given the number of mold spores he’d probably inhaled over the last couple of days, it seemed stupid to worry about an old woman’s dubious level of personal hygiene. Besides, all things considered, he didn’t imagine he was going to get paid for this gig, so a bit of free food was the very least the owner of Wethersfield owed him.

###

It took another full day to thoroughly clean the vast hall. Another day of singing along with the radio and chatting aimlessly with the rabbit that had unexpectedly ousted Lolly’s position to become his new constant personal shadow.

Maybe the carrots had helped cement the new relationship.

It seemed animals were far less complicated than people. A couple of carrots and it appeared the rabbit was hooked. Shame the same simplicity didn’t apply when dealing with humans. Life would be so much easier if people applied the same principles of barter. When Dean thought about all of his prior failed relationships, both romantic and otherwise, it seemed to him that he had always given and people had always taken but that he had never felt valued. Maybe, he thought, that was why mad cat ladies existed. Because tired of expending all their emotions on humans who just took and took and took and then fucked off when you ran out of things to give, those wise women chose to reserve their hearts for creatures far more transparent in their motivations. Give any animal food, warmth, and affection and it apparently offered total loyalty in return.

A much more satisfying transaction.

Damn, maybe he should have taken people’s advice to buy a cat years ago.

Though he was now wondering whether a bunny would have been an even better choice.

Although Lolly, Oswald and Nyx were now permanent fixtures in the kitchen, the dog always responding to his presence with a wagging tail and a toothy grin and his lap remaining Nyx’s chosen perch of choice whenever he sat down at the table, it was the rabbit that now appeared unwilling to ever let him out of its sight. Wherever Dean went inside the house, the bunny hopped along; its silent presence becoming such a constant that he found himself always needing to check for its whereabouts before ever taking a step backward or climbing down off a ladder. He knew he’d never forgive himself if he inadvertently trod on the little critter.

And it was such a quiet sneaky little bastard that he could envisage that happening easily enough if he wasn’t always super-vigilant.

“You need to wear a bell,” he scolded it, several times, when lost in thought as he worked he completely failed to notice it until it was practically underfoot. So he found that it was easier to keep track of its presence if he treated it like a companion, easier to remember it was there if he continually spoke to it as he worked.

Or sang to it.

He knew his voice wasn’t the best. It had a tendency to slip off-key, and he’d witnessed his brother’s wincing bitch-face enough times in the past to have learned not to give in to his natural enthusiasm to sing loudly along with the radio unless he was totally alone. 

The rabbit didn’t count though. Not because it was only an animal - so was hardly likely to offer unasked-for vocal critique - but because it actually seemed to like hearing Dean’s voice. The more Dean sang as he worked, the closer the little furry creature chose to shadow him. It would sit there, its ears and whiskers twitching in time to Dean’s warbling, and although Dean didn’t kid himself the rabbit was enjoying his singing - because, as Sammy had often pointed out, even milk would curdle in response to Dean’s voice - it was obvious the silent bunny thoroughly enjoyed his noisy company.

Maybe the rabbit had been a particular favorite of Agnes. It definitely seemed more… needy… than the other animals. Perhaps it had been her personal, pampered pet. He could understand that. Its long fur, that always looked in need of a damned good brushing, was far more tactile than that of the other pets. It practically begged for fingers to stroke and knead its silky lushness. Dean never gave in to his urge to simply pick the rabbit up and squeeze it to him like a big, warm plushie but, secretly, the desire to do so was strong.

“Shadow,” he tried, experimentally - as he finally finished cleaning and began gathering his rags, mop, and bucket. The light was fading and his stomach thought his throat had been cut. It was definitely time to eat something. The rabbit was almost black and it definitely behaved like a shadow. Could be a good name, he thought.

The rabbit stared at him for an interminable time, then pointedly turned around and showed Dean its ass as it hopped away to the kitchen.

“Didn’t like that one either, huh?” Dean laughed.

The huge lop-eared, chocolate-colored rabbit spent most of the following day with him too; watching him like a creeper as he began the process of sanding down the mahogany panels in the hallway. 

It was fortuitous he’d taken the initiative to clean the hall because, after sharing breakfast with Lolly and the rest of the gang on that fourth day on the island, he’d followed the dog out into the kitchen garden and, some way beyond the rows of cabbages, he’d discovered a large shed containing a surprising amount of DIY tools and equipment which included several rolls of sandpaper and a couple of dozen large tubs of wood stain. 

He was momentarily confused that he had managed to entirely miss the presence of the building on his initial perusal of the garden but it was towards the rear of the garden and he recalled he had been distracted by the rabbits at the time. He assumed the contents of the shed formed part of the equipment that he now remembered Crowley had promised was already available on the island. This presumably meant that somewhere behind the house he was going to find a stack of ‘sustainable’ timber too, though he decided to leave further investigation for another day since the shed conveniently contained everything he immediately required.

Pleased with this initial discovery, he grabbed the sandpaper, went back into the kitchen, wound up the radio and then sang along with the staticky sounds of WICH as he crossed off a number of line items from the basic materials list he’d been compiling and decided he might as well make a start on the panels since the day was chilly and overhung with threatening clouds. Not a day to be outside. Definitely not a day to be heading back to the mainland for… for…

His left eye began to throb and then the radio chirruped a cheerful announcement that a Noank store was running a March Madness special on ladies’ ski equipment, everything half-price until the ‘vernal equinox’ - whatever the fuck that was, but it sounded vaguely dirty, so it made him chuckle.

Then he blinked in surprise. Was it really March already? More importantly though, why the fuck would anyone would want to buy goddamned ski equipment in March in goddamned Connecticut? He shook his head, tried to remember what it was he had been thinking about but...

… nope. He couldn’t remember.

As Toby Keith warbled out through the crackling radio, Dean began sanding the wood, his hand moving in rhythm with the music.

_“Baby I'll be your Huckleberry, you don't have to double dare me; If the ride gets wild and scary count on me to be right there; You're so extraordinary sweet like maraschino cherries; We'll grow up and we'll get married; I'm gonna be your Huckleberry”_

Dean smirked, looked over towards the big lop-eared fuzzball. “Wanna be my huckleberry?” he snorted.

To his surprise, the rabbit immediately responded by hopping down the hall in his direction and settling right at his feet, its head almost at Dean’s knees and, for the first time, Dean’s fingers managed to stroke the silky softness of its lush fur.

Huh, he thought to himself. What were the odds of that? Must have been what Agnes had called him, or close as dammit. 

So that was how the rabbit came to be named Huckleberry.

Weird though.

Highly improbable that he should just hit on the name so easily.

Unless, of course, Agnes had been a fan of WICH too. The radio station constantly replayed the same classics, so maybe it made sense that was where she’d chosen the original names from. Maybe it had been inevitable that Dean would have eventually found the right song.

As REO Speedwagon began singing, “ _I've been thinkin' too much, I've been drinkin' too much, And thinkin' and drinkin' for me is a dangerous combination,”_ Dean shrugged and turned his attention back to the hallway.

The wood panels in the hall, now clean, were all badly in need of sanding down before he could begin staining them but, fortunately, were otherwise completely undamaged. He frowned, feeling momentarily unsettled by that realization. The panels hadn’t only been dirty, had they? They’d been thick with mold, with creeping rot, with damp and the jagged gnawing of rodent incisors and…

Damn, now both his eyes were throbbing.

_“And I'm lonely as hell, with a story to tell; I'm talkin' to myself and that's a dangerous conversation”_

Dean blinked, the words feeling all too personal considering he was arguing in his own head over some clearly impossible memory. And, since his head was aching like hell again, maybe he out to take REO’s advice and just shut the fuck up and get on with his job. He shrugged and decided he obviously simply had an overactive imagination. He must just have assumed that cleaning the panels would reveal underlying damage.

With that realization, the throbbing pain in his temples seemed to ease considerably.

_“But you may be just a little too much temptation; If we're gonna turn back, better turn back now.”_

He sang along to the radio, as he began sanding the mahogany, which inspired Lollipop to yip excitedly every now and then from the kitchen, but otherwise, the dog seemed even less interested in him today, soon choosing to ignore him completely in preference of sprawling in front of the Aga to lazily snooze. 

Huckleberry, on the other hand, continually hopped up and down the hall, poking his nose occasionally against sections of the panels and twitching his nose curiously, although Dean had absolutely no idea why the rabbit was particularly fascinated by those specific places.

As far as he could see, they were no different from any other sections of the paneling,

“What’s up, Huckster?” he asked, in the brief pause between songs as some advertising jingle cheerfully announced a 2 for 1 sale at one of Mystic’s fishing bait shops. Dean snorted. He couldn’t imagine a pastime more boring than fishing.

The rabbit didn’t answer. It just stared at him, its head cocked curiously, and then it twitched its whiskers furiously,

The advertisement finished, the DJ at WICH radio spun to playing Alice Cooper, 

Dean sang along, cheerfully out of tune.

 _“We work this band 'cause they make it rock; But we're the guys that make it roll; We move the drums, and amps, and junk; Road rats: we're a pack_ ”

He froze.

Rats….there were rats in the walls weren’t there? He was sure there had been rats… Rats… what had happened to the damned rats?

For a moment he heard them in the walls, their tiny feet scurrying, their teeth gnawing, gnawing, gnawing, and on one of the panels, directly in front of Huckleberry, at the place he had been sniffing, a memory slid into place in Dean’s mind, fitting over his current vision like a ghostly overlay. A vision of a dark, jagged hole in the panel in that exact same place. 

And along the hallway, dozens more black patches indicating hole after hole after hole….

Places from which rats the size of cats were surely going to spill through at any moment and tumble and fall through like a savage tide of fur and teeth and… and...

On the radio, Bobby Darin suddenly sang, 

“ _Bird flying high; You know how I feel; Sun in the sky; You know how I feel; Breeze drifting by; You know how I feel_ ”

Dean had the weirdest sensation of the world lurching around him, a fog lifting as the late afternoon sun suddenly broke through the clouds above the house again and shone through the picture windows in a welcoming burst of color. The hallway was bathed in rich, comforting warmth as the shadows lifted and… He staggered slightly, disoriented, and shook his head, wondering why he suddenly felt so lightheaded. 

Mild pain stabbed into the back of his eyeballs. He rubbed his eyes. He was more tired than he’d realized. Too tired. His shoulders ached like a mother and he suddenly became aware he had been working for hours.

His mouth felt parched and dry, his throat scratchy, as he realized he had been talking to the rabbit all along, telling it god-only-knew what kind of personal crap just to hear the sound of his own voice, or something.

Had he forgotten to eat lunch again? He thought he probably had.

Godamned blood sugar drop had nearly put him on his knees.

He cursed himself for being an idiot, and decided he needed to call it a day and go get something to eat.

But he paused long enough to gaze with satisfaction at the several fully sanded, pristine, unmarked mahogany panels he'd completed. At this rate, he’d have the whole vast hall ready to stain within a week or so more.

The ache in his eyes and shoulders faded, the mild pain replaced with nothing more than a feeling of tired satisfaction at a job well done.

He sang along with Bobby, as he made his way back to the kitchen, Huckleberry loping at his heels, 

“ _It's a new dawn; It's a new day; It's a new life; For me; And I'm feeling good_ _._ ”

###

He named the cute little calico cat Cherry - _Sweet cherry pie, yeah_ \- and the big grey cat Zeppelin, because it spent most of its time sitting on one of the kitchen counters looking like a fat, immovable loaf. Now he had cleaned the filth off the bay window over the daybed, the entire kitchen had been transformed. The morning sun shone in through the sparkling glass and, between that and the cheerful heat from the Aga, the room definitely had a pleasant homely feel.

For some reason, his hastily scribbled work list had suggested several of the cabinet doors in the kitchen would need to be completely replaced but, now that they were clean and he had tightened the screws on a few of the door fixings, he couldn’t imagine why he’d ever thought they were irreparably damaged.

He clearly had allowed Sandover’s motto of ‘if in doubt, replace it’ to pervade his own attitude. He was no longer working for a corporate firm that always worked to maximize profit, he reminded himself furiously. ‘Make do and mend’ was a far more suitable motto for restoring an ancient house like this.

The Aga had worked its own magic on the room. The back door was moving freely within its frame now. He no longer required a screwdriver to jimmy his way in and out to the kitchen garden. The warped door frame had dried out with the warmth from the range and now the back door opened and closed with ease.

It was another job he could cross off his list.

And thinking about the list finally reminded him he was supposed to be going to the mainland to call Crowley. 

His interest in the Mainland may also have been inspired by an advertisement blurting out of WICH radio for ‘A slice of heaven from Mystic Pizza’ which, apparently, wasn’t only a film. He thought he was well overdue to have some fast food. Sure he was living like a hermit on an island but he was only an hour and a half max away from a big succulent slice of Pizza pie. How the hell had he forgotten that?

For the last week or so, although he’d lost track of time completely so couldn’t remember exactly how long he’d been at Wethersfield, he’d found himself inexplicably shying away from the thought of taking the boat back to shore. On this morning, however, the idea of nipping over to the mainland finally felt comfortable, felt right.

And his stomach definitely rumbled its approval of the plan.

“Want to come with me?” he asked Lolly.

Lollipop chuffed, grinned a big happy toothy grin and thumped his tail several times.

He tried not to feel guilty about not inviting Huckleberry too, despite the way the rabbit’s ears drooped when he firmly told it “We’ll be back soon, bud.” Obviously the creature couldn’t possibly really understand him, but it sure as heck acted as though it could.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Dean told Nyx, as she glared at him with green eyes wide as saucers. Her expression was not as inscrutable as she imagined because he knew exactly what those imperious eyes were demanding. 

Tuna. 

He’d painstakingly worked his way through the vast Dutch Barn extension that formed the larder, carefully cataloging its contents, surprising himself with the bewildering array of available goods, but had discovered a sad lack of any form of tinned fish. Maybe Agnes had preferred to do her own fishing. It made sense, he guessed, given that they were living on an island, but the idea of going out into the bay with a rod and line was definitely not Dean’s idea of a good time.

So now that he’d worked his way through the supply of tinned fish he’d brought with him - which was oddly concerning since he thought he’d brought at least a couple of dozen tins in his rucksack and surely he hadn’t been on the island that long - the only food he had to offer the cats was kibble and that, from Nyx’s disgruntled expression, was simply not acceptable.

Zeppelin, fat lump that he was, appeared to agree with Nyx. Sweet little Cherry was on the fence, apparently grateful for any edible offerings at her particular temple of worship.

Dean wondered how the heck the cats had managed during the months they’d been abandoned alone on the island. 

“I guess you had to catch and eat the rats, huh?” he asked, then frowned and shook his head as a stabbing pain shot through his eye sockets like the precursor of yet another damn headache. He reached for his tub of Tylenol and popped a couple of its rapidly shrinking contents, just in case. What had he been thinking about? Oh, yeah, that the cats must have lived on a diet of field mice or something.

“I need fresh air,” he announced. Maybe there were pockets of dry mold in the dusty house. It would explain his persistent headaches and the way his thoughts kept jumping around like an old needle skipping tracks on a scratched record. “Come on, Lolly. Let’s go to the mainland, call that Crowley guy and then we can get some pizza for lunch and go shopping for her majesty’s tuna.”

###

The surly guy who had handed over the keys and arranged for someone to return his car and trailer clearly wasn’t a complete asshole, Dean decided. Either that, or he’d at least been paid enough to drop his attitude long enough to be genuinely useful.

He clearly remembered the tires of the Impala had been dangerously flat, so much so that he’d arrived fully prepared to walk just far enough to get a cell signal and then call a local garage for assistance.

The Attorney had clearly been serious about supplying a ‘functional’ car though, because someone - and Dean assumed it could only be the surly guy - had pumped the tires and fixed the broken head and tail lights whilst Dean had been on the island.

The car still looked like she had lost a fight with a semi but she was, at least, legal now.

He popped the hood and checked her oil and water before turning the ignition. Not that he was sure she’d start. Unless surly guy had thought to charge her battery, she wasn’t going anywhere soon. God only knew how long it had been since she had been last used.

But she started immediately, her engine misfiring only once before smoothing to a rumbling purr oddly reminiscent of Nyx.

“You’re a lady,” he told her, patting her dashboard appreciatively. He looked through the windshield, which although dirty and scratched in places wasn’t cracked at all although he could have sworn…. he frowned, feeling the slight itch of yet another headache forming. He shook his head impatiently, refusing to let his first drive of… of… Baby.. be ruined by something as mundane as a tension headache.

“Come on,” he told Lolly, patting the bench seat until the dog jumped inside and settled next to him. Then he reached over, closed the passenger door, and pulled Baby slowly out of the garage and onto the road that would lead away from Westcove Bay, through Noank, towards Mystic.

His phone picked up a signal almost immediately as soon as he hit the main highway, so he pulled over to the side of the road and called the Attorney.

Crowley picked up on the third ring.

“Mr. Winchester. I was beginning to think you’d fallen out of the boat and drowned,” he said, though his tone was too dryly sarcastic to indicate any true concern. “Do you have a materials list yet?”

“Still working on that,” Dean replied, then wondered why that was the case. He blinked with surprise as the answer came to him like a half-forgotten memory. “The house is far worse than the photographs you supplied suggested. I may have to considerably revise my estimates.”

“Really?” The attorney drawled. “I find it unlikely that significant structural changes could have occurred in such a short amount of time since Ms. Harrison’s death.”

“I took photographs of the damage as soon as I arrived,” Dean protested defensively, then hesitated as he remembered, belatedly, that he’d left his digital camera at the island. Why had he done that? This was his opportunity to raise his initial concerns and he had stupidly forgotten to bring the evidence with him. “I intend to send them with the materials list,” he said, to appear more professional and hide his own confusion.

He’d forgotten about the camera altogether. 

He needed to look at the pictures himself, see if they offered a clue as to how he had been so mistaken about the condition of the hall, for instance.

Now he was away from the house, he felt less headachy, less confused, and now as he thought back over the last few days - was it just a few days? - it seemed impossible to believe he hadn’t questioned the discrepancies sooner.

He clearly remembered seeing the mold and damp in the hall, the holes in the paneling, and the sound of rats running through the walls.

Except none of that had been real, had it?

Was it really possible he’d simply hallucinated the whole thing? Damn. He wished he had his camera with him now, so he could check the evidence against his memories.

Somehow he finished the call without making an even bigger fool of himself, assuring the attorney that he would email him in a few days with his revised estimate, and then he ended the call and just sat there, the silence broken only by Lolly’s panting breath.

What if there was something psychotropic growing in or around the house? He could have accidentally ingested the spores of Psilocybin mushrooms or something similar. That would explain his confusion, his missing time, his apparent false memories, and hallucinations. It made a hell of a lot more sense than the idea the house had somehow begun to magically repair itself from the moment he’d arrived.

The answer lay inside his digital camera.

He needed to look at the pictures he’d taken on the morning after his arrival. If they showed no damage in the hallway, then he’d know for certain that he’d simply imagined the whole thing and that, realistically, had to be the case. Somehow he’d accidentally ingested a pile of magic mushrooms or something, so all of his ‘memories’ were nothing more than bizarre fever dreams.

Maybe the mushrooms, or whatever, grew everywhere on the island. As he thought about it, he remembered his first walk to the house, a walk that should have taken no more than twenty minutes or so, and yet, somehow, he had lost more than an entire hour of time. Was that when he’d inadvertently been drugged somehow? It would at least explain why he’d mistaken the Wisteria over the main door for a jagged crack in the lintel.

He laughed suddenly, a sound of relief that made Lolly chuff and grin. His disjointed memories suddenly made complete sense. 

‘But you haven’t seen any mushrooms,’ a voice niggled at the back of his head.

He ignored the voice. For one thing, if his hypothesis was true then he probably wouldn’t remember even if he had. Besides, maybe they were growing inside the walls of the house. Maybe his bizarre belief that vicious man-eating rats were teeming inside the walls of Wethersfield was just his subconscious trying to warn him of a different kind of danger inside the house.

He checked he had 4g connectivity, pulled up the google search bar on his phone and froze as he saw the date displayed on the top left of his screen. _Fri 13 Mar._

It couldn’t be.

He couldn’t possibly have been on the island for over two weeks.

It had only been a few days… hadn’t it? Surely only a week at most.

But it at least explained how he had run out of Tuna. And, thinking about it, he had finished sanding the hall, hadn’t he? And he’d itemized the entire contents of the Dutch Barn. Those two jobs alone would have taken that long, wouldn’t they?

But why didn’t he already _know_ that?

Which inevitably brought him back to the consideration of some form of psychotropic drugs.

He quickly typed in a search for whether magic mushrooms naturally grew in the Connecticut area.

Yup, psilocybin mushrooms were known to grow in the region. The woods could be full of them. Hell, for all he knew, Agnes Harrison had actively cultivated the damn things. Out of curiosity, he kept searching for other varieties of vegetation known to have psychotropic properties.

And froze as he saw a picture of a cheerful, yellow, black-eyed flower that was all too familiar. A plant that rioted in the walled kitchen garden of Wethersfield. A plant that wasn’t, it turned out, Black-eyed Susan at all.

It was Henbane.

Which was, apparently, the drug that made witches believe they could ‘fly’.

He google searched ‘Henbane’ and soon discovered that, like Belladonna, it had uses as a herbal remedy, was psychotropic, and had been rumored to have been used in witchcraft for a thousand years.

And, with a sinking feeling, on one of the sites he found, he discovered a recipe for Henbane Beer and so, naturally, began to wonder about the provenance of Agnes’s homebrew.

Had the old lady been nothing more than an aging hippy, deliberately cultivating a hallucinogenic plant in her garden? Had she used it in all of her brews? Hell, what if she’d used it in preparing her canned food too?

Dean was lost in thought for so long that Lolly chuffed impatiently, looking longingly out of the windshield, his mouth open in a panting grin.

The sound shook him out of his panic. He hadn’t even moved into the kitchen - or started eating and drinking from the larder - until the day after he’d examined and photographed the first floor, he suddenly remembered.

He was worrying over nothing. Even if the plant in the kitchen garden was Henbane, even if Agnes had used the plant in her cooking and brewing, it wasn’t the cause of his _initial_ hallucinations - and, yes, he was firmly now of the belief his first viewing of the house could be discounted as such and his camera would prove it.

“Sorry, Ms. Harrison,” he muttered, for his momentary conviction she had been some kind of new-age hippy witch. It seemed a pretty disrespectful thing to think about Wethersfield’s prior occupant and, incidentally, Lolly’s prior mistress.

He slipped Baby back into drive, checked his mirror - which, now as he thought about it had been smashed a couple of weeks earlier, so surly guy had obviously fixed that too - and pulled back onto the road in search of a shopping mall.

He had tuna to purchase and a Pizza restaurant to track down.

###

The first thing he intended to do, he reminded himself, as he moored the boat and picked up his heavy bags of shopping, was to check his digital camera.

It was getting late in the afternoon, but the day was still clear and surprisingly warm for the middle of March. Winter was nearly over, it seemed, because spring was obviously keenly nipping at its heels.

A yipping, overexcited Lolly - who seemed to have been given a carb rush by the pizza pie Dean had shared with him - led the way down the path to the house, constantly running ahead and then looping back impatiently as Dean struggled under the weight of the tins and the spare clothes he had collected from his stash at the boathouse.

Despite the heavy load, it still took only thirty minutes to reach the house and that again reminded him of the discrepancy of the timing of his initial arrival, although he’d checked the path as he’d walked and hadn’t seen any sign of mushrooms growing on the woodland floor.

Peculiarly, the path, although winding, didn’t seem as circuitous as he remembered. It seemed straighter somehow. Maybe an optical illusion caused by the fresh leaves beginning to bud on the branches of the trees that formed a canopy over the path.

Nyx, Oswald and Huckleberry were waiting for him on the veranda when he finally reached the clearing where the house resided.

All three looked suspiciously wet.

Nyx looked particularly unimpressed with her sodden fur but poor Huckleberry simply looked sincerely miserable, his lop ears trailing wetly on either side of his face and leaving glistening trails on the paving slabs as he hopped forward to greet Dean’s arrival with large, sad, apologetic, liquid eyes.

“Oh shit,” Dean cursed, taking in the wet animals, the dry landscape, the fact it had been a clear sunny day and the total absence of any explanatory external factor such as a pond. He dropped his shopping bags on the grass and raced into the house, only to immediately slide on a film of warm water that covered the hallway.

He splashed through towards the kitchen, already knowing what he would find. One of the pipes above the Aga had split and was pouring a slow steady stream of hot water down onto the floor.

Zeppelin and Cherry were cowering on kitchen counters, staring down at the water covered floor with offended horror on their furry faces at being trapped in place. Although, in Zeppelin’s case, it was clearly performance art since the fat bastard never moved anyway unless food was involved.

Dean found the stop cock to turn off the water, though there was little he could do about the water that was already inside the heating system and, unlike an oven, the Aga couldn’t just be turned ‘off’. All he could do was throw a bucket under the pipe, open the back door, fetch a mop and start sweeping the water out into the garden until the pipe finally ran dry and he was able to do a repair.

He probably needed to check all of the pipework in the house, because if one pipe had failed, others would inevitably follow suit, but he couldn’t stay there at all without heat so, for now, he just wanted the water to run out of the heating system so that the pipe would cool enough for him to repair it before the Aga finally burned through its existing fuel and shut itself down completely.

The pipe must have burst only in the last hour or so, he decided, because surprisingly little damage had been done. He managed to mop up the standing water before it reached the base of the wooden cabinets in the kitchen. He was possibly going to have to change a few skirting boards in that room but they had already been on his list for replacement so he decided he might as well just rip them out immediately instead of hoping they might dry without warping.

The only real minor casualties of the disaster were the half-empty sack of kibble he’d left sitting on the kitchen floor and his two rucksacks. He pulled his clothes out of the first one, laying them out on the table and the chair backs to dry so they wouldn’t go moldy before he had a chance to wash and dry them properly. He decided to leave the bag with his tent until the next day. He would unfold it and put it up to dry out in the sun. 

He found epoxy putty and lagging in the shed behind the walled garden, after moving there cautiously through the waving cheerful faces of the henbane plants, and then he made a quick and efficient temporary repair of the cracked pipe.

Then, as he waited for the epoxy to set, he remembered he was planning to check the photographs in his camera.

His _digital_ camera.

The one sitting inside the sodden bag containing his tent.

He groaned, knowing even before reaching to rummage inside the bag what he was going to find.

“And you can shut the fuck up too,” he snapped at Oswald who had returned to the kitchen to warm himself in front of the Aga now that the floor had been mopped dry.

The turkey just blinked at him and gobbled cheerfully.

Dean stared at the drowned corpse of his camera and realized he somehow wasn’t even surprised. He still ejected the SD card and slipped it carefully and discretely into his wallet. The water might have killed the camera but he highly doubted the card holding the photos had been similarly affected by being submerged. He was reasonably certain the photos could still be accessed but his Smartphone didn’t have an SD slot to test the theory.

Besides, he had a weird but pervading suspicion that this had not been an ‘accident’. That admitting the photos might be viable could, somehow, cause yet another attempt to delete them.

An attempt by who or what? He had no idea. He figured there was little point trying to justify his paranoia because going there would necessitate consideration of possibilities he simply wasn’t prepared to contemplate.

And, of course, there was always the even more possible explanation that he was hallucinating this entire goddamned flood.

Of course he was feeling paranoid.

He couldn’t even trust _himself._

Enough was enough.

He would stay one more night, since it was too late to get back to the mainland before dark, and in the morning he would go and see whether Agnes’ room could offer him any clues as to what the fuck was going on in this house, and then… then he would leave and find somewhere that had one of those photo booths where you could print out from an SD card.

And on that note, Dean decided he might as well go to the larder, fill one of the stone flagons from a barrel, and then drown his sorrows. Henbane or not, at this point getting a buzz on definitely seemed the best possible immediate solution to his problems.

###

He woke the next morning to a dry, warm kitchen.

He couldn’t remember refilling the Aga with wood before climbing into bed, but he must have. Just as he must have, at some point, judged the epoxy dry enough to turn the stop cock back on because he could hear the gurgle of hot water running cheerfully through the pipework.

Cherry, Zeppelin, and Nyx were curled together in a fur-pile near the Range and Lolly was sprawled at the bottom of the daybed, his chin resting on Dean’s ankles.

Oswald and Huckleberry were conspicuous by their absence.

He frowned. He hadn’t seen the lop-eared rabbit since the previous evening when the poor bastard had been sodden-wet. He hoped the rabbit hadn’t spent the night outside because fur as long as the rabbit’s would probably take hours to dry and it was still early enough in the year for morning frosts.

Concerned enough to decide to go looking for the little critter, he carefully slid his legs out from beneath Lolly’s head and swung them down to the floor, only to yelp in pain as he stubbed his bare toes on the huge pile of tins he had purchased the day before.

Dean blinked in surprise. When the hell had he gone back to collect them? He distinctly remembered dropping the bags in front of the house when he’d run in to deal with the flood. He definitely didn’t remember going back out to fetch them.

Exactly how much beer had he drunk the night before?

Too much, he decided, as he quickly dressed, then stepped into the hall and found the door to a room he had mentally nicknamed the ‘library’ - since it was lined wall to wall with heavily laden bookshelves - was unexpectedly wide open and, stepping through it, he discovered not only Huckleberry but at least a dozen other rabbits hopping around inside.

“Out,” he told the chocolate-colored rabbit. “And take your harem with you, Romeo. No orgies in the house, please.”

Although the other rabbits scampered away in fright, driven off simply by his appearance in the doorway, Huckleberry settled firmly on his haunches and stared Dean down with his peculiar, piercing blue eyes. After a couple of minutes of losing the face-off with the truculent ball of fluff, Dean sighed and gave in.

“Okay, fine. I guess this is your way of saying I should make a start on this room next, huh?” Dean grumbled good-naturedly. He thought he had been contemplating mounting the stairs to the second floor in search of Agnes’s bedroom that morning, but he couldn’t remember why exactly, and then again, he also needed to start staining the hall today, didn’t he?

Although, maybe the Huckster had a point. It would make more sense to get the whole downstairs of the house clean and prepared before doing any decorating. The last thing he needed was dust on wet surfaces and so early in the year it would take a long time for any stain or paint to dry out completely.

“You’re not supposed to be working at all,” a voice niggled in the back of his head. “You were only ever going to stay a couple of days, as a ‘mini-vacation’, just long enough to quote the damned project and then you were supposed to leave the island unless or until the owner agrees to your terms, remember? You’ve already been here for fifteen days. What the hell are you doing, Dean?”

The voice had a point, and something was niggling at the back of his mind that there was another reason to leave but… but… no. Whatever it was escaped him. Besides, it wasn’t as though he was ripping out floorboards or replacing a roof. He was just cleaning the place, so no harm no foul, and he wasn’t in any particular hurry to leave, was he? 

Though wasn’t there…

Nope, no reason he could think of.

And, since this was his vacation, he could damn well do what he wanted with it.

His argument was weak but since it was only himself he needed to convince, it worked.

It took a while to locate a ladder and bring it, and his cleaning supplies, into the room, but Huckleberry was still patiently waiting for him on his return.

The rabbit was such a cute little thing, he thought, as he swept up the worst of the debris from the floor before using the ladder to collect all of the dusty books from the shelves and pile them in the center of the room. The books smelt musty and old, but weren’t actually damp or rotting so they were probably worth trying to save.

“Maybe, if it’s sunny tomorrow, I’ll take them outside onto the lawn and let them get some fresh air. Well, probably not the oldest ones. I don’t suppose I should put those in sunlight. What do you think?”

Unlike Lolly, who would have probably excitedly yipped in response to being addressed directly, the rabbit just sat there and stared at him in silent judgment. Only the occasional twitching of its ears and whiskers indicated it was listening to him at all.

Oddly, although both Lolly and Huckleberry were only animals so, obviously, neither of them could understand a word he was saying, Dean still found it was always far easier to talk to the rabbit simply because it never made a sound in response.

The thing was, Dean wasn’t a ‘talker’. He internalized all of his thoughts, rarely ever talking about anything that might be considered ‘feelings’. It was just the way he was. He didn’t judge people who spoke their emotions out loud but, “It just isn’t the Winchester way,” he explained to the rabbit. “Sammy never really got that.”

As the shelves gradually emptied and the pile of books grew in the center of the room, Dean found himself telling Huckleberry all about his brother. Vocalizing things he’d never even tried to put into words before.

“You see, the thing is, I get why he wanted to get away. He was always the smart one. He won himself a scholarship to Stanford, which is real big potatoes, trust me, and considering the way we both grew up, I don’t blame him for taking the opportunity to make something better for himself. He was never going to settle for KU like me. Just, well, I kinda thought when he went to California he’d ask me to move there with him, you know?

“Stupid, I guess. I mean, the whole University experience is supposed to be all about going off on your own, isn’t it? And just because I didn’t get that myself, because I had him to look after, didn’t mean I wanted him to miss out on it too. I’m not that much of a selfish asshole. But it still kinda hurt. I guess because he was all that was left of my family at that point and that meant something to me. Even if he didn’t seem to feel the same way.

“Anyway, I got the job at Sandover, which I kinda hated, but it was really well-paid. Working there meant I earned enough to send Sam money so that he didn’t have to get a job to supplement his scholarship because, trust me, I did that work and study at the same time crap and it’s for the dogs. I didn’t want him having to do the same shit. I thought, when he finally finished school, I’d jack it in and move wherever he got an internship and start a little contracting business of my own. Only he met this girl, Jess, a real pretty little thing. I met her at his graduation. Which is where he also told me he was going back to live and work in her hometown. Her folks had already found a place for them and, well, he didn’t say anything but it was pretty damned obvious he hadn’t even considered the idea I might want to follow him there.

“And who could blame him? Good for Sammy. A fresh start. A brand new life. Why would he want to drag his past into that? Believe me, you do not want me to bore you with the details of that crap, Hucks. Just take it that we had a weird kind of upbringing. So I got why Sammy would want to leave it behind. But it still kinda hurt that he seemed to want to leave me too. 

“Anyway, there I am, finally realizing I was stuck doing a job I hated, living in an apartment too big for me and having absolutely no-one who would give a damn whether I stayed or went, when I saw the advert for this place. When I saw the photo of this house it was like… like seeing a memory. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I knew I’d never seen the place before but, even so, it felt like I should have. Seemed like a sign, somehow. Like an omen. Crazily, it seemed as though, I dunno, like it was speaking to me specifically. Calling out to me? Stupid, huh? 

“So, anyway, I dunno what I’m going to do next. I mean if this place doesn’t pan out,” he said, as he prepared to step down the ladder for the final time, sighed at the huge book mountain in the middle of the room and tossed the last book, a fat, heavy, leather-bound encyclopedia, down onto the pile.

A cloud of dust erupted, as though that last final volume was just one book too many, its weight driving the dust from the pages of all the books below it, and the room seemed to immediately fill with floury white particles.

Huckleberry sneezed.

Dean, who was half-way back down the ladder, choked and coughed so violently that he doubled over, his eyes watering furiously, and his foot slipped, missed the next rung, and he fell the final few feet to the ground.

It wasn’t a bad fall, more a clumsy scramble not to land on his ass rather than his feet and, if he hadn’t still been struggling to breathe, he probably would have wounded nothing more than his pride. As it was, he clipped his forehead sharply against the surprisingly sharp corner of one of the piled-up books and the impact of his flesh against the rigid leather binding sent a white-hot jolt of pain through his head that - whilst the impact had not been sufficient to break the skin - still felt like a nasty sucker-punch that left him feeling slightly nauseous for a moment.

He swayed with shock for a few seconds, fighting the urge to vomit, then straightened up, blinked to clear his vision and looked around the room. The sun was glaring through the windows, clearly illuminating all of the dust motes and as he gazed at them swirling like a thick fog, he was surprised that either he or the rabbit could breathe at all.

What the hell had he just said?

‘If’? 

There were no ifs, were there?

Because suddenly, as though with his coughing fit and the glancing blow to his head, a curtain had briefly lifted, illuminating his thoughts with long-forgotten clarity, he remembered why he had been intending to go to Agnes’s room that morning.

Fuck.

What the hell was he doing?

But it didn’t matter, just as this room didn’t matter, because even if the peculiar ‘magic’ of the house had caused him to ‘forget’ again, to ‘lose time’ again, all it had really managed to do was put off the inevitable. Even going upstairs to investigate Agnes’ belongings would have just been another pointless delay (and yet another chance for the mold - or whatever else it was in this house that always managed to derail his thoughts - to grasp hold of him once more) like wiping and sanding and painting shelves in a room that no one was ever going to use.

He had been intending to leave the island today, hadn’t he?

But he’d somehow forgotten.

 _Again_.

Until, by pure chance, a blow to his head had literally knocked some sense back into him.

And, suddenly, Dean was completely and utterly terrified. What if it wasn’t a psychotropic drug? What if someone, or something, was deliberately doing this to him?

He needed to get the hell away from this house and never come back.

Despite the thudding of his heart, he didn’t let an iota of his fear show on his face. Somehow, he didn’t think it would be a good idea to show that he’d come to his senses, even if he was still unsure who, or _what_ , might be paying attention to him in this empty house.

“How about we leave the shelves for another day, huh?” he suggested to the rabbit, his tone deliberately casual. He patted his backside surreptitiously, checking he’d remembered to slip his wallet into his back pocket. Thankfully he had, the habit so ingrained he’d done so subconsciously. “We’ll let the dust settle first,” he continued out loud, unsure if he was talking to the rabbit or some other, unseen presence, but sure it was somehow important to Iie about his reason for leaving the house. He was positive that returning to the kitchen for the rest of his things would, somehow, end up with him getting somehow ‘distracted’ enough to forget his intentions once again. “I want to go outside and look at the stone ender anyway.”

Huckleberry didn’t reply, obviously, but when Dean left the room and headed for the front door, the large chocolate-colored rabbit followed him like a faithful shadow.

Oswald, surrounded by a gaggle of adoring chickens, with his chest puffed out proudly, was sunning himself on the front porch. Despite his panic, the sight still made Dean smirk. He’d never considered Turkeys to be attractive looking birds, but here on the Island, being twice the size of any rooster, Oswald was clearly king to the gathered chickens, and he appeared to know it. Much to the obvious disgust of a nearby rooster who was glaring at the turkey with vengeful eyes.

“Looking good, Oz,” he called out as he passed by, feeling peculiarly saddened that he couldn’t say goodbye properly to the bird. Or Lolly. Or the cats. Because the minute he walked past the corner of the house he was going to make a break for the tree line, start running and not stop until his ass was in that damned boat and he was heading back to the sanity of the Mainland.

But he forced himself to stroll casually across the front lawn, chatting to Huckleberry, not doing or saying anything to give away his intention to leave for good.

Just in case.

“So, I was thinking,” Dean told the rabbit, as they walked around the side of the house. “I was a bit hasty writing this gig off,” he lied. “Nothing is as bad as I first thought, so assuming the upstairs and the basement aren’t write-offs, the only real possible deal-breaker is this crack from the foundations. Thing is, if this wall is irreparable then the whole house is going to be structurally unsound whatever else I do to it. So maybe I need to just nip back to the mainland and talk to Crowley again, I think, because…”

Then he stopped, freezing in place, as he looked up at the stone ender.

“No,” he said. “No, no, no, no, no.”

Because although he hadn’t fully visualized what he was expecting to see, given the way things seemed to work around Wethersfield - or the way his own mind seemed to work around the house - he fully expected to find that the crack in the stone would have appeared to have somehow shrunk yet again. 

Instead, it had disappeared completely.

The entire wall was as perfect and unmarked as it had been when the house was first built, almost 350 years earlier.

The way it had looked in the photographs provided in the project pack.

This either meant someone was fucking with him completely or he had been crazy since the moment he had first laid eyes on the house. He needed to get to the mainland, look at the photographs on the SD card, find out whether he needed to get a fucking brain scan or something. What if it wasn’t drugs? What if it was a brain tumor or something? What if all the hallucinations, the missing time, and the false memories, were all evidence of some genuine, terrible illness?

But what would he do if the photos showed the damage he had seen? What if they proved his memories were real?

He shook his head furiously. That wasn’t possible. Obviously that wasn’t possible. The only possibility was that all of this was in his own head. The only question was whether it was mushroom spores, henbane or actual neurological damage. And, regardless of the answer, staying on the Island even a single hour more was impossible. He needed to get the hell away from this place before, somehow, he again ‘forgot’ to leave.

So he turned, without warning, and made a sudden break for it. He ran towards the tree line, heading for the path, heading for the way back to the cove, not looking back, refusing to look back even though, in his imagination, he envisaged some huge, dark malevolent shadow rising up from the house in pursuit of him.

But the path wasn’t there.

Somehow, the path had completely disappeared.

All there was, as far as his eyes could see, was a solid wall of trees.

Just trees, endless trees, interlocked so closely together that he couldn’t find a way through. Trees with branches wrapped so closely that it was like meeting a wall formed of rough timber. Trees that seemed huddled like a crowd of people standing in a row, branches interlocked like arms, with barely inches between their trunks. No opening, no path, no way out, no way to escape the house.

Unless there was… and he saw it then, a single gap of perhaps twelve inches where two trees had failed to, impossibly, close the gap between them completely. So he twisted his body sideways and dove through the narrow gap, hoping, praying, that once through the initial resistance the trees would return to their normal positions.

And even as he pushed through he told himself this wasn’t possible, that trees couldn’t move; that this, like everything else, had to be a hallucination.

But the branches that whipped across his face like grasping arms, dragging against his flesh like clawing fingers; cutting his cheeks and his arms; ripping and rending his flesh; his clothes; felt real enough.

And, even as he felt a trickle of warm blood running down from his right cheek to his chin, a root lifted up in front of him, piercing the loamy, leaf-strewn ground, rising in his path like a hand rising out of a disturbed grave and reaching for him with malevolent intent, so that his foot tangled in its unyielding wood and he stumbled and tripped and he was falling, falling, arms trying and failing to brace him, until his head impacted against one of the tree branches and, even as he felt the blinding pain of the impact against his forehead, he felt himself crumpling to the ground and then…

Everything went dark.


	3. Part Three

He woke the next morning to a dry, warm kitchen.

He couldn’t remember refilling the Aga with wood before climbing into bed, but he must have. Just as he must have, at some point, judged the epoxy dry enough to turn the stop cock back on because he could hear the gurgle of hot water running cheerfully through the pipework.

Cherry, Zeppelin, and Nyx were curled together in a fur-pile near the Range and Lolly was sprawled at the bottom of the daybed, his chin resting on Dean’s ankles.

Oswald and Huckleberry were conspicuous by their absence.

He frowned. He hadn’t seen the lop-eared rabbit since the previous evening when the poor bastard had been sodden-wet. He hoped the rabbit hadn’t spent the night outside because it was still early enough in the year for morning frosts.

Concerned enough to decide to go looking for the little critter, he quickly dressed, then stepped into the hall and found that the door to a room he had mentally nicknamed the ‘library’ was unexpectedly wide open and, stepping through it, he discovered not only Huckleberry but at least a dozen other rabbits hopping around inside a room containing a huge, inexplicable mountain of piled-up books.

“Out,” he told the chocolate-colored rabbit. “And take your harem with you, Romeo. No orgies in the house, please.”

And, even as he said it, the deja vu hit him.

He had been here before, said those exact same words before.

And he remembered running, running, running and…

###

He woke the next morning to a dry, warm kitchen.

He couldn’t remember refilling the Aga with wood before climbing into the bed, but he must have. Just as he must have, at some point, judged the epoxy dry enough to turn the stop cock back on because he could hear the gurgle of hot water running cheerfully through the pipework.

Cherry, Zeppelin, and Nyx were curled together in a fur-pile near the Range and Lolly was sprawled at the bottom of the daybed, his chin resting on Dean’s ankles.

“NO, this isn’t real,” he yelled, and time… stopped.

###

He was lying on his back on the dank, leaf-littered, shadowed soil beneath a huge, gnarled Oaktree. Above him, through the winter-bare dark branches, he could see glints of daylight, patches of cool blue suggesting a clear, cloudless sky overhead. The leaves he lay on were soft and brown, damply rotting into the rich loam of the woodland floor. Around him, more trees; twisted trunks all thick with age; bark deeply wrinkled, ancient and immovable.

Between each tree the gap was wide. They were not huddled together, encircling him in a trap. They weren’t monstrous nightmares. They were just trees.

Just trees.

He sat up, slowly, cautiously. His cheeks stung with the movement and he reached up, his fingers trailing a slow exploration of the evidence of scratches long scabbed over, the trace of powdery dried blood on his jawline. On his forehead, he could feel an egg-sized lump that suggested he had smacked his head hard enough to even cause a concussion, but the lump had no heat and barely felt tender. He was sure if he looked at himself in a mirror, he would see a bruise that was deep but faded to yellow. Days old, even.

Though if he’d been lying outside for days, shouldn’t he be dead of exposure? It was only mid-March. 

Or was it? How many days had passed?

He had no way of knowing, except that he wasn’t hungry or particularly thirsty, so surely hardly any time at all despite his peculiar certainty that the bruise on his forehead was old.

The book, he remembered suddenly. He had hit his head on a book. In the library. With Huckleberry. And then… and then…

He remembered running, remembered being panicked and running and the trees… something about the trees… but… no… THAT wasn’t how he’d hurt his head. The trees hadn’t attacked him. He’d just slipped off a ladder and then...

Damn, he must have really hit his head hard because he didn’t remember anything about how he had got into the woods, only some bizarre and obviously nonsensical idea that the trees had come to life and had walked. That the path between the trees had somehow disappeared.

The path he could clearly see, a few feet to his left, even as he sat there in the cool shade of an immovable oak tree.

A path from which several concerned furry faces were staring at him.

“Hi, guys,” he said, his voice croaky with disuse.

Lolly yipped and waved his tail in happy welcome.

Nyx just glared her typical disdain, her tail flicking impatiently.

Oswald gobbled inquisitively, his head cocked at an angle so he could watch Dean with one bright, intelligent eye, even as his whole posture indicated confusion as to why the heck Dean was choosing to sit in a damp, dark wood instead of a warm, dry kitchen.

Which seemed a damned good point, Dean decided, struggling to his feet even as Huckleberry left the path and hopped over to him, his eyes huge and liquid, his whiskers twitching, his ears drooping into a posture that ridiculously seemed filled with concern.

Though, realistically, Dean considered as he absently picked the rabbit up and tucked it under his arm like a big, warm, furry plushie, the animals had probably just woken up hungry and had come looking for him in hope he’d get off his ass and provide breakfast.

###

He couldn’t have been outside the house for long, he decided, as he sat in the kitchen and let the warmth of the Aga envelop him.

The range had still been burning, with its logs only half charred, so he must have refilled it less than six hours previously.

His wallet was currently on the kitchen table, where it had been - in clear sight - when he entered the room. Where it had evidently been all along. So it had never been in his back pocket, despite him remembering checking that it was there. It had been important that he had it in his dream. He remembered that, even if he couldn’t remember why.

But who the heck ever made sense of dreams, anyway?

Because, even though he didn’t remember doing it, he must have simply gone to bed after his fall in the library and then, possibly because of the head injury, had dreamed all of the rest. He had obviously had a nightmare about feeling trapped and had sleep-walked - sleep-ran? - into the woods early that morning, only to then wake up there a few hours later.

It was the only thing that made sense.

###

As he made himself some breakfast - obviously after first feeding his disgruntled hungry ‘friends’ - he wound up the radio and tuned into WICH.

Despite the crackling static, Donna Summer’s voice was unmistakable:

“ _Ooh, something's coming over me; Ooh, I think it's got a hold on me, it's got me, it's got me; Ooh, just the man I hoped you'd be; Ooh, just the man to set me free, you got me, you got me; You got me, you got me; Spring affair, spring affair, spring affair”_

Was it spring already? Dean wondered. He didn’t think so, at least not astrologically. It couldn’t be later than the 16th or 17th and he vaguely remembered reading, or hearing, somewhere that the equinox was going to be on the 19th.

Something teased the back of his mind, some other significance to that date but… no… the memory slipped away, gone like a wisp of smoke.

“ _And I'm hung on you; Spring affair, spring affair, spring affair; And we've got something new, me and you, oh baby; Ooh, guess I'm falling much too fast; Ooh, I hope this love is gonna last, I've fallen”_

Dean shuddered. He really didn’t want to think about ‘falling’; as he buttered some toast - the bread he’d bought in Mystic a couple of days earlier had already gone completely stale, for some reason, but it still toasted nicely on the Aga’s griddle - it occurred to him, belatedly, that the real problem with living alone on the island was that if he had an accident, there would be no way for him to get help. What if his silly pratfall off the ladder had been really serious? It didn’t bear thinking about.

“ _And for you superstitious folks out there, don’t forget, this year the vernal equinox is the earliest it’s been for over a century. That’s right, listeners, the equinox is today, the 19th, so look out for the faefolk dancing tonight, throwing those lucky flower petals. And on that note, here’s a message from our sponsors, Stonington Garden Center….”_

How the fuck was it the 19th already?

And, suddenly, he remembered the significance of that date… the stipulation in the contract that he had to be on the island by the 19th of March at the latest.

Why?

At the time the date had seemed arbitrary, just another nonsensical clause by an eccentric owner, but now - in view of everything else - it seemed less coincidental than highly suspicious. The equinox. There had to be something significant about the equinox.

For a second his vision blurred and his heart thudded with panic as a disjointed memory of an old film popped into his head. Wasn’t this how the plot of the Wicker Man had started? Some idiot sap getting lured to a remote island to be sacrificed, burned alive, in a flaming pyre as a sacrifice to Wiccan gods?

Well, yes.

Except, obviously, this was a deserted island, so there was no-one here to do any sacrificing and, besides, this was spring equinox and that film had been about a harvest sacrifice, a summer ritual, and also, hello, that had been a _film_. Plus, weird as the place was, Dean thought he’d kind of remember seeing if someone had built a hundred-foot tall wicker effigy on the island.

Even so, there was something significant about him being here today. 

Which was a pretty good indication he should get the hell out of Dodge.

Which was also why he wasn’t even surprised that, at the exact moment he came to that conclusion, the kitchen dimmed as the sun was swallowed by a dark cloud and the light streaming in through the kitchen window was replaced by the slow, soft patter of raindrops.

It was a gentle rain.

Just a light non-threatening drizzle.

But Dean _knew it_ would transform into a fierce storm if he so much as attempted to leave.

“Okay,” he said, out loud. Addressing the animals, the house, or whatever invisible presence was lurking. “I give in. I give up. Whatever the hell is happening here, whatever the fuck you are planning on doing to me, how about you all stop fucking with my head and just get it over and done with?”

Nyx jumped on the kitchen table, her huge emerald eyes seeming to measure him with Sphinx-like dispassion for a long while, as though she was weighing him in her mind, judging him, before she blinked once, then tail aloft, leaped off the table, prowled towards the door to the hall, then looked back at him with an imperious, wordless, but unmistakable demand that he should rise and follow her.

Although her actions, and her attitude, were no different from any normal cat wanting a human servant to open a door, something shifted in Dean’s mind, a settling, an acceptance. There _was_ magic here. He saw that now. Everything that had happened on the island from the moment he had arrived was suddenly clear in his head, every ‘forgotten’ moment reclaimed, so that he could rifle through them all, like a kaleidoscope of images. If he stopped fighting, if he accepted every impossible, if he took that one single step of believing this place had ‘magic’, then the only real question was whether the magic was something ‘evil’.

And, honestly, he didn’t think it was.

Weird as fuck, sure. Terrifying, definitely. Evil? He didn’t think so.

Nothing that had happened had been bad. Quite the opposite, really. The only harm that had ever come to him in this place had been his own fault, caused by his own moments of panic. If he stopped fighting the evidence of his own eyes, stopped looking for logical explanations for the impossible, the truth was that the only thing the house had done since his arrival was to repair itself, to transform itself into a habitable place, into a _welcoming_ place.

Even the damn _car_ had somehow begun to repair itself, hadn’t it?

He had the sudden complete conviction that if he returned to the boathouse right now, the dented panels of the Impala were probably already pristine once more.

The longer he stayed on the island, the more everything connected to the place seemed to _heal_.

Shit.

“All you guys have just been trying to make me want to _stay_ , haven’t you?”

Lolly yipped excitedly, his tail waving like a flag.

Oswald gobbled contentedly.

Huckleberry hopped over to join Nyx, his blue eyes so bright they seemed to glow with an inner light as he added his silent entreaty that Dean should obey the Cat’s demand to open the door and follow wherever she led.

Dean rose to his feet and walked over to them. “It’s still kidnapping, ya know,” he grumbled, as he opened the door. “You can’t just _make_ me stay here.”

Huckleberry replied with a soft, liquid, doe-eyed sorrowful expression that made Dean’s heart lurch a little. 

“Oh, fuck it,” Dean muttered ungraciously. “Just show me whatever the fuck is so important, already.”

He wasn’t surprised when they led him to the base of the staircase that led to the second floor.

Neither was he surprised to find that the staircase was pristine and flawless, its wooden steps glossy and unmarked even by dust. 

And he remembered how it had looked on the day he arrived, treacherous steps faded with age, their wooden slats broken and scuffed, the whole structure liable to collapse under the slightest weight, covered with guano, and he remembered the rustle of bats and birds roosting above.

He had a moment's hesitation as his foot touched the first step. What if _this_ was the illusion? What if he trusted his weight to this immaculate vision but the steps truly were rotten. He would fall and break a leg, or maybe his neck, and he wanted to run, run, run…

But no.

He was done running.

He took one cautious step, and then another. 

The steps held his weight.

And so he took a deep breath and followed Nyx and Huckleberry up the staircase to the upper floor. 

“So why have I been living in the kitchen, huh?” he asked, as he walked down the upper hallway with its unmarked walls and spotless floor, past door after open door all revealing clean, welcoming rooms, until, at the end of the corridor, the animals led him into a huge master bedroom brightly bathed in warm sunlight.

“Rain stopped the minute I decided to stay, huh? Odd that,” Dean muttered, but his grumbling was half-hearted. 

This had been Agnes’s room. He knew that without being told. It wasn’t just the feminine touches, the Victorian dresser with the silver-handled hairbrush and ornate mirror, the painstakingly embroidered comforter on the four-poster bed, the various trinkets, cushions and ornaments that spoke of a female occupant.

What spoke to him immediately that this had been Agnes’s personal room was the Altar in the bay window.

A _deep_ bay window despite the exterior of the house displaying nothing but _flat_ windows. But he was long past worrying about such ‘minor’ discrepancies. So he pushed the thought impatiently aside and concentrated on the Altar instead.

Well, he wasn’t sure that ‘Altar’ was the right word but it was the closest descriptor he could think of. 

At some level, he’d always imagined that Agnes had thought of herself as a ‘witch’. The henbane had been a pretty clear indicator of that. Plus the… well… magic of the house was a bit of a clue. But in the moments he had allowed himself to consider the possibility, the moments when he hadn’t been running so fast from the idea that he had dismissed everything as hallucinations, he had been thinking of a ‘witch’ as being some old hag with a mole on her face boiling frogs in a cauldron whilst muttering curses or something.

But looking at the artifacts on the ‘Altar’, Agnes Harrison had not been an escapee from a Grimm’s Fairy Tale. Nor even a pure devotee of Wicca.

Agnes seemed less guilty of Magic, whether black or white, than of cultural appropriation.

Because amongst the Celtic knots and other Wiccan talismans, the totems and the spiderweb charms were Ojibwe. The sandstone stele centerpiece was Cantabrian. And, unless he was mistaken, the whole altar was aligned so that the stele would be haloed by the sunrise like a tiny, miniature Stonehenge.

“Okay,” he said, looking around the room. He’d half hoped to find some journal, some diary or, even, some ancient book of spells. But there was nothing, not even in the drawers of the dresser of the shelves of the small wardrobe. “So what now, huh?” 

Nyx jumped up on the bed - a bed far more comfortable looking than the one in the kitchen - turned around a couple of times and then settled down in a cosy ball with the clear indication she intended to go to sleep. 

Despite the height of the mattress, Huckleberry used his powerful hind legs to leap up and join her.

“That’s it?” Dean demanded incredulously, as the rabbit settled next to the cat and closed its eyes pointedly. “We just came up here for a nap?”

Huckleberry opened one blue eye to glare at Dean and twitched his whiskers impatiently.

“Why the hell not,” Dean muttered, joining them on the surprisingly clean, if faded, comforter. “Maybe I’ll dream the damned answer.”

###

He was lying on his back on the dank, leaf-littered, shadowed soil beneath a huge, gnarled Oaktree. Above him, through the winter-bare dark branches, he could see glints of daylight, patches of cool blue suggesting a clear, cloudless sky overhead. The leaves he lay on were soft and brown, damply rotting into the rich loam of the woodland floor. Around him, more trees; twisted trunks all thick with age; bark deeply wrinkled, ancient and immovable.

“Been here, done this already,” he complained, with a groan. His head hurt enough that he decided to just lie there and catch his breath for a moment before attempting to sit up.

“Oh, it worked. That’s good,” a cheerful male voice replied. 

“Did you doubt it?” a cool female voice asked, her accent the precise clipped tones of Received Pronunciation.

“I honestly wasn’t sure. There’s only so many times you can hard reset someone’s mind before you run the risk of turning their brain into a slushie,” the male replied nonchalantly. “Thought Deano here might finally have turned into a drooling idiot.”

“Are you sure we’d notice a difference?” the female asked cattily. 

“Owch. Put your claws away, Kali. The poor boy may be an ingénue, but he isn’t willfully naïve. Don’t fault him for ignorance of matters beyond his ken when we have been deliberately concealing the truth from him.”

“I’m bored,” she replied. “This cosseting of his ignorance has been tiresome and ultimately pointless. Tu’er Shen is a sentimental fool.”

“And you’re a pitiless bitch, Kali, but we don’t hold it against you. Though step carefully, my love. Cassie has grown exceedingly fond of this mortal and today, of all days, his power is at its zenith. Bring harm to the boy and I don’t believe you will enjoy the consequences.”

“I don’t intend him any harm,” she scoffed. “I believe both you and Castiel completely underestimate him. That’s all I’m saying. He has… resilience. For the first time in generations, his bloodline has bred true again. We have all witnessed his potential. By the end of the winter, the power must cease to be potential and become actual. It needs to be harnessed before this opportunity eludes us for another four hundred years.”

“Lightning can’t be lassoed and trapped inside a jar, Kali. It must be lured and moved to our purpose. Cassie is right. Patience, admittedly not my strong-point, is key.”

“Who the fuck are you people?” Dean demanded, using his hands to force himself into a seated position despite his immediate feeling of vertigo.

The woman, Kali, was drop-dead stunning. Her flesh, of which there was much on show, was so black it appeared a deep, oceanic blue. She was dressed in nothing more than a shift of black silk that covered just one indigo shoulder, hung low over high, pert breasts, and then barely swept the top of her thighs. Long glossy black hair fell in a sleek wave past the knees of her endless legs. Eyes a huge, emerald green framed by black lashes so lush she appeared to be wearing kohl. Like a goddess personified, she stared at him with a gaze so impersonally judgmental that she didn’t need to speak before the familiarity of that expression offered him the answer.

“Nyx,” he breathed. “You’re Nyx.”

She frowned at him, her expression cool and unbending. Then she sighed and relaxed incrementally before, finally, saying, “I enjoyed your prasada. I choose to grant the boon of my mercy.”

“My what?” Dean asked, blinking in confusion.

“She liked the tuna,” the man interpreted with a wide grin. He was less immediately impressive than the female, his shaggy hair a russet-tinged blond, his eyes the same dark golden hue, his stature was slim and he was several inches shorter than the blue-skinned goddess. Yet despite his more ‘human’ appearance, there was something mercurial and chaotic about him. An air of something dangerous lurking just beneath his smiling expression. Something a little wolf-like. Sly. Like soft fur hiding sharp, sharp teeth.

“Lolly?” Dean questioned hesitantly.

“Well, it’s actually Loki,” the man answered cheerfully. “But close enough for government work, as they say.”

“As who says?” Kali demanded.

“It’s a saying.”

“It’s a stupid saying,” she snapped.

“Don’t mind Kali. She’s a grumpy bitch at the best of times ” Loki told Dean, with a conspiratorial wink. “But she’s all hormonal today. Spring fever. You know how it goes. The hot flushes, increased heart rate, daydreaming, and an inclination towards romance – all wrapped up in a very strong desire to ditch the drudgery and go outside and frolic. So here we are, ta da! Just waiting for the sun to set and we can get this show on the road.”

“Where’s Huckleberry?” Dean demanded suspiciously because he’d gone to sleep with Nyx and the rabbit, not Lolly.

“Oh, don’t you worry about Castiel. This is his day. He’s a bit busy right now. It’s a rabbit thing. He’s all, juiced up, let’s say, so probably best you get with the program before we go track him down. Pesky things, rabbit gods. Get a bit over-enthusiastic today, if you know what I mean,” and he waggled his eyebrows suggestively.

Dean swallowed nervously. “You’re all… um… gods?”

“A mish-mash of pantheons, but yeah,” Loki agreed. “Well, except for Oswald. He’s just a turkey. Nice guy though. We don’t discriminate. Obviously. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be bothering with you either. But we don’t hold your mortal status against you. No prejudice here. Mi Casa es Su Casa and all that.”

Dean rubbed his throbbing forehead. This was obviously a dream, although it felt as real as every other inexplicable thing that had happened to him in the last month.

Maybe it was _all_ a dream.

Perhaps he was still in his apartment in Kansas City, having one doozy of a nightmare before his alarm went off and he was due to return to Sandover for another fun day of designing shop refits. In which case, maybe staying in this dream a bit longer wasn’t exactly a bad thing.

So he rolled with it.

“Okay so all of Agnes’s ’pets’, except for Oswald, are gods in disguise?”

“Well, not all. For instance, the rooster, Alectryon, is, but the rest of the chickens are just chickens. At least I think so. Al gets a bit snotty if you ask him whether any of his harem are gods. Claims it’s speciesism. Which is totally bogus. Look at it from that point of view and you’d have to consider Ai-Apaec’s relationship with Kathy was bestiality too.”

Kali snorted, her mouth twitching with a reluctant smile.

“Who is Ai-Apaec?” Dean asked cautiously.

“The old fat guy you call Zeppelin,” Loki explained, with a casual shrug. “Peruvian cat god. Had a thing for Kathy. Wasn’t a grand romance. More just a sex thing. But they were exclusive, so must have been real in its own way. The two of them were knocking boots for centuries. Love is love, even when it isn’t _love_ , you know?”

Dean rubbed his temples again. “So who the hell was Kathy?”

“Katherine Harrison. The caretaker. The gatekeeper. Not a totally necessary role, but the place tends to fall apart a bit without a human in place. Stops feeling like a home. Though, admittedly, Kali just prefers it when she doesn’t have to open her own tins, I think.”

“Katherine?" he frowned. "I thought her name was Agnes.”

“There was no _Agnes_. It was just a name; like Alis, and Sarah, and Mary, and Beatrice.”

“Who?” Dean asked, now completely confused.

“They were all just names she borrowed for a while, because she couldn’t remain Katherine forever, could she? Humans tend to notice that kind of thing and this island isn’t completely isolated. Katherine liked to visit the mainland. Well, until she didn’t. But when she _did_ , she couldn’t let people realize she never aged. So, every sixty or seventy years she became a new legal person, became the daughter of her prior identity. Agnes was simply Katherine’s last name. The one she was wearing when she finally chose to walk through the gate herself.”

“Katherine Harrison was the gatekeeper of Turtle Island for the last three hundred and forty years,” Kali agreed.

“The island’s called Wethersfield, there’s no damned turtles here and nobody lives for over three hundred years,” Dean protested.

“The name Wethersfield was only a romantic indulgence on Katherine’s part. A remembrance of her life before she lost everything and had to find a new family. A new home. I believe she attempted to honor us with the choice. Besides, Turtle Island isn’t truly a geographical ‘place’ at all. And Katherine was almost four hundred when she finally grew tired of constantly reinventing herself. The modern world moves so quickly now. The multitudinous changes in a single human lifetime can be too much to adapt to, let alone multitudinous lifetimes. The dramatic progression of civilization in modern times proved too much for her. After almost four hundred years of life, Katherine reached a saturation point. For the last thirty years or so, she rarely left the Island at all. She found the new ‘technologies’ too much to adapt to, so she allowed herself, finally, to age and move on. Perhaps mortals are simply fundamentally unsuited to immortality. Her passing was a sorrow to us all,” Kali said.

“Not to mention bloody inconvenient,” Loki griped. “A human, the right human, acts as a lodestone, drawing the surplus magical energy that seeps out from the gate and neutralizing it before it builds up into something chaotic. Kathy had a natural talent for wiping up surplus psychic energy and utilizing it in harmless ways. Useful ways. How else do you imagine the house kept _growing_? Kathy would visit the mainland, see some new house design and, next thing we knew, there would be yet another room tacked on. Very confusing. The Dutch Barn was genius though. Gotta admit that one.”

Dean shook his head in a mixture of confusion and disbelief. “You’re telling me some human dame lived here for three and a half centuries without aging, building a house with her mind, until she just got _bored_?”

“Happens to the best of us eventually,” Loki said, with a shrug. “I’m the last of the Norse pantheon myself. Everyone else gave up the ghost eons ago. This island is the last open gateway into the dream world. The place where the last of the gods, those too ornery to just accept our existence is no longer necessary, dwell together.”

“Because there are those of us who are still relevant,” Kali snapped. “As long as time exists, so shall Kali.”

“As I said, ornery. And, of course, there are those who are still crucially necessary. Such as Tu’er Shen. He still has much work to do, sadly,” Loki admitted. “Not sure what Alectryon’s continuing purpose is, though. Being a Chicken God is so passé.”

“Unless you have a passion for KFC,” Dean pointed out, with a smirk.

“Point,” Loki admitted thoughtfully, as though Dean had been serious. “Maybe he powers himself on all the Colonel worship.”

“So who is Tu’er Shen?” Dean asked.

“Your furry friend, Huckleberry,” Loki said, with a wink. 

“You said his name was Castiel,” Dean protested.

“He’s a god, Deano. He has many names. It’s a god thing. Different people in different times and places see him in different incarnations, call him different names. But he is only ever one God. He is Qasfiel, ruler of the moon. He is Tecuciztecatl. He is the angel of tears. He is the Jade Rabbit. He is Tu’er Shen, the god of homosexuality. But, generally, I just call him Cassie.”

“I didn’t know there was an actual god of homosexuality,” Dean admitted.

“Google it,” Loki replied airily.

“What if I google Katherine Harrison instead?” Dean challenged.

“I’ll save you the bother,” Loki said, snapping his fingers impatiently and, like a tsunami, information flooded into Dean’s head.

“No,” Dean protested. “That’s bullshit. There’s no way I’m related to this Katherine broad. That’s an impossible coincidence.”

“There is nothing coincidental about it,” Kali said.

“You said it yourself, Deano. You told Cassie the advertisement spoke to you. Like it was written specifically for you. Well, it was. Or at least anyone of your descent. I should clarify that it wasn’t the only advertisement posted. There were others. Most simply offering a caretaker position in some form or other - since, obviously, we never required anyone to actually manually restore the property - but each advertisement was aimed to appeal specifically to each Harrison descendent in your generation in the hope that one of you would contain the magic that would both draw you to this place and enable you to become the new gatekeeper.”

“And I was the only sucker who fell for it?”

“You were the third ‘sucker’, actually,” Kali corrected, with a sniff of disdain. “The other two both proved immensely unsatisfactory.”

“Two of your cousins on your mother’s side,” Loki explained. “Tyler and Christian Campbell. They were the reason certain stipulations were written into your contract. Tyler was responsible for the murder of one of the wood nymphs, when he hewed her tree for firewood. Christian attempted to snare Cassie for a late night snack. Both were encouraged to leave forthwith.”

“We didn’t kill them. Although I wanted to. Tu’er Shen said it wasn’t appropriate to punish ignorance with death. He’s a horribly modern deity. I never thought I’d exist long enough to see a politically correct god gain ascendency. Things were so much more simple in my time,” Kali muttered darkly.

“Cassie is all about the feels,” Loki agreed. “He believes all mortals should be encouraged to learn and grow into better people. Gotta admit Kali and I are more old school. We older gods were always more inclined to discard the worst of mortals. There are so many of you that it’s too easy to see the bad seeds as disposable. More efficient to thin the herd than try domesticating the runts. But, as Kali said, this is no longer our time of ascendance. Cassie is a modern god for modern times. Still, he was furious with your cousins. He had no hesitation in erasing their memories and banishing them from this place. He may be merciful but he is not weak.”

“But their presence on the island was like a cancer. It caused the house to decay,” Kali said. “From the moment they stepped foot on the island, each tainted the magic here with their avariciousness and selfish desires. Tyler was the cause of the stone ender first cracking in two and the invasion of the rats into the walls. Then Christian’s presence brought a creeping rot into the house, like an insidious disease that continued to progress even after he left.”

“You, Deano, on the other hand, brought healing with you,” Loki said. “The moment you arrived on the Island, we knew you were different. The woods allowed you to pass through them. After Christian’s departure, the path through the woods sealed itself off completely, it became impassable, yet you arrived and even with weeks to go before spring, the nymphs awoke, broke the shackles of winter, and moved themselves to allow you a route through. Not a small endeavor whilst Winter still rules this land.

“So Kali, who had sworn to destroy any further mortal visitors, instead was intrigued enough to approach you in her cat form, rather than a far more dangerous manifestation, and you greeted her with an offering, and so she allowed you to live.”

Dean swallowed heavily, and gaped at the indigo goddess. “My life hung on whether I gave you that tin of mackerel?”

“It was an acceptable offering,” she allowed. “But, for future reference, I always much prefer tuna.” She smiled at him with far too many sharp teeth.

“Duly noted,” he said, weakly.

“The real problem was that you arrived a little too early,” Loki explained. “And your power was greater than we anticipated. The house began to heal too quickly, too obviously, and there was only so long we could count on your natural skepticism to continue convincing yourself you were hallucinating. I admit we may have employed certain… measures… to keep you from panicking and leaving completely.”

“Why didn’t you just, I dunno, talk to me?” Dean demanded.

“Because, except for two days each year - when we can tap directly into the power of the dream world - we can only physically manifest within the form our worshippers expect to see,” Loki explained. “For instance, Tyler - because he had an ingrained dislike of animals - saw me as a mangy, half-starved cur. Christian - because he was a fearful, cowardly man who saw danger everywhere - pictured me most accurately as a timber wolf. You - peculiarly - saw me as some odd mix of lassie and scooby doo,” Loki explained with an eye roll. 

“Because Crowley told me there was a dog here? So you're saying I just saw the kind of dog I expected to see?” Dean asked.

“Exactly.”

“So from now on, I’ll see you like this?”

“Either/or,” Loki clarified. “I can now manifest in either form at will because your mind now expects both forms.”

“Weird,” Dean said.

“You think that’s weird?” Kali snorted. “There are temples to me where I am expected to turn up stark naked with ten arms. The four-armed gigs are tolerable but have you ever tried to balance with ten arms?”

“Can’t say that I have,” Dean admitted, wincing at the thought. “But today, because of this vernal equinox thing, you can appear to me however you wish?”

“Exactly.”

Dean thought about that. “So these aren’t necessarily your real forms either?”

“It’s like the names thing,” Loki shrugged. “We’re gods. Many names. Many forms. Best you just go with the flow, really. We’re really, really, trying not to break your brain, Deano.”

“Really?” Dean scoffed. “Because if any of this is really happening, I could definitely build a case that you’ve been deliberately screwing with my brain for weeks.”

“Screwing with people is pretty much what I do,” Loki said, unapologetically. “And of course it was necessary to trick you. But the last thing any of us wanted was to _harm_ you. We need you. The whole damned point of this was to find a new gatekeeper and the way you subconsciously picked up all the redundant magic and started automatically healing the house proved, absolutely, that you’re the right Wicca for the job.”

“Wicca?” he queried.

“You’re a male witch. Ah... Ah... Ah… before you start arguing the point, I’m not talking about pointy hats and cauldrons. I’m referring to your innate magic. Like it or not, you’ve got it in spades, Deano. You don’t even need to try. It’s your birthright. All this place is doing is allowing you to tap into an ability that has always existed inside you. But there just aren’t many places left in the world where you can still tap into a source of magic to draw upon. This is the only place remaining with a clear and open gateway. Stay here forever and you’ll always be able to access your full potential.”

“So what was the two-year contract all about? And who the hell actually hired me? Who actually owns the island?”

“The two years was just arbitrary. We merely needed to be sure no-one would come looking for you if you dropped off the map and became incommunicado for a while. As for the owner, the island belongs in perpetuity to the heirs of Katherine Harrison. You, in this instance. Crowley merely does and says as he is instructed. He is somewhat of a Wicca himself. Though, admittedly, he is the form of instinctive self-serving sorcerer who gives those with your particular natural talents a bad name. He benefits financially from certain deals he arranges on our behalf. His avaricious use of magic is an indelible stain on his soul, but we have to use the tools available to us.”

Dean thought about that. It finally made some kind of sense. Maybe. As long as he was willing to suspend disbelief and just accept he wasn’t simply insane. “So now you’ve told me all this, am I trapped here? How far will you go to protect your secrets?”

“If you want to leave tomorrow, I guarantee no one will stop you,” Loki said. “This isn’t a prison. It’s not as though anyone would believe your story anyway, is it? So if you want to turn your back on your inheritance, and possibly end up locked in a loony bin, knock your socks off, Deano. We only wanted to keep you here long enough to be able to explain the choices available to you. Gotta say most people would see the opportunity of obtaining near-immortality to be a pretty good gig.”

“And I know Castiel doesn’t want you to leave,” Kali added. “Which is the only reason that I bothered preventing your premature escape. Well, that and the tuna. I have a surprisingly soft spot for the little leveret. He’s still young enough to naively dream of happy endings.”

“Young?” Dean queried, confused.

“Not all Gods are ancient, Deano. Although Castiel is, like all of us, as old as time in concept, in his current incarnation as Tu’er Shen he is only a young god. Born even after Katherine moved to this island. Still young enough to have a purpose and a place in the lives of mortal men. He’ll hopefully exist in this world long after Kali and I cross the veil. And even gods get lonely. Cassie has a busy role, Dean. He is called upon a lot. One crisis or problem after another. So many people in pain. So many needing his help. I worry one day he will lose himself, forget to return here at all, burn himself out like a falling star. So many gods fall, Deano. They blaze in glory for a short while, a mere few centuries, then burn up like expended fireworks and are gone, forever.

“I feared that would be his fate because he is so terribly lonely and in his works he sees such horror, such misery, such unthinking cruelty caused by man to fellow man that it would be so easy for him to become bitter and disillusioned. Humans form who gods become. A righteous man has always transformed a wrathful god to a merciful one. Cassie is quiet and thoughtful and caring and wrathful. Protective and loving yet powerful enough to smite with just a thought. How can he possibly, faced with such constant misery, remember to always love all mortals unless he learns to love a single mortal? Without someone like you, Deano, he will eventually become as detached from human suffering as poor Kali here.

“And, between you and me, even in these few weeks you have been here I have seen her soften again. I see flowers beginning to bloom again on the barren slopes of her ancient temples. Your presence here has reminded even my fierce, jaded, beloved that humans have worth.”

“I haven’t done anything,” Dean protested, blushing with embarrassment. “I’ve just stumbled around here like an idiot in some kind of crazed fever dream.”

“You have begun restoring our home,” Loki argued. “That is what this place gives us. A home. Somewhere to always return to where we can just be. Sometimes it’s important to know that someone will give a damn whether you stay or go, don’t you think?”

“Okay, I get what you’re saying but how the hell am I supposed to translate that into some obligation on my part to this Castiel guy? Sure I like the Huckster but your matchmaking sucks, Loki. Don’t give up the day job. He’s a goddamned rabbit.”

“He’s not a rabbit. He’s the rabbit _god_ ,” Kali snapped. “Not the same thing at all.”

Dean boggled. “You mean he really is El-ahrairah? Fuck.”

Loki rolled his eyes. “No. He is not a fictional deity, Deano. He’s the real deal. Just like me and Kali. And he likes you. Likes, likes you, if you know what I mean.” He waggled his eyebrows suggestively. “And whilst I appreciate the concept probably blows your tiny little mind, take it from me that it’s usually a good idea to at least let a God down gently, if you’re not interested. It’s your own fault anyway. You’re the one who told him he could be your ‘huckleberry’. Don’t blame me if he took you at your word. So at least go talk to him,” he said. “That’s all I ask. And if you still wish to leave tomorrow morning, I promise I will escort you safely to the cove myself.”

Dean considered that and paled slightly.

He understood now why Loki had accepted the name ‘Lollipop’, Lolly was as close to ‘Loki’ as he would ever have possibly stumbled upon. Kali clearly didn’t give a shit what he called her as long as his opposable thumbs were available for tuna duty. But Tu’er Shen, Castiel, had accepted the name ‘Huckleberry’ because Dean had… had… what the fuck had he said to the rabbit… to the goddamned GOD… “wanna be my huckleberry?”

Fuck.

He’d propositioned a God, hadn’t he? 

This was his own fault.

Shit.

And he couldn’t even say it was a mistake, that he’d thought he was only talking to a rabbit, without possibly making the situation sound even worse.

He couldn’t remember the specific details, because his mind was filled with the white static of sheer panic, but he was damned sure mythology was filled with the tales of dire consequences faced by mortals who ever dared to reject the amorous advances of gods.

Then he forced himself to take a deep breath and calm down.

This was the Huckster they were talking about. Sweet, cute, soft-eyed Huckleberry. Even if the Hucks was a God, his personality was going to be as familiar in a human form as Nyx was as Kali and Lolly was as Loki. So, whatever the God actually looked like, he wasn’t going to be capricious or cruel or cold. Because Huckleberry was none of those things.

And judging by the human manifestations of the two gods in front of him, chances were Huckleberry was also going to turn out to be pretty damned _hot_.

Loki snorted loudly.

“Shut up,” Dean snapped. “It’s a fair consideration.”

“Shallow,” Loki suggested. “But, yeah, fair. And trust me, Deano, you won’t be disappointed.” And he waggled his eyebrows suggestively again.

Dean believed him. He wasn’t peculiarly hesitant about seeking out this Castiel, or Tu’er Shen, or whatever the fuck he called himself because Dean thought he might not find him attractive. Instead he was horribly conscious that he was Huckleberry, his silent cuddly confidant. The being he had spilled so many secrets to, so much word vomit that had spilled out of his mouth only because the little chocolate rabbit couldn’t judge, couldn’t reply, couldn’t betray his confidence.

To know that Huckleberry was a god, a man, who knew him so intimately was… was terrifyingly disconcerting.

“Or liberating,” Loki suggested slyly.

“Get the fuck out of my head,” Dean snarled. Though Loki’s comment brought some perspective. If Loki could read his mind, if all the gods in this place could read him like an open book, he had no secrets from any of them. They all knew his deepest, darkest secrets….

And yet they _still_ wanted him to stay.

“Now you get it,” Loki smirked, with a wolfish grin. “We like you, Deano. Even Kali tolerates you and, believe me, that is not a small achievement on your part. You are welcomed here. Wanted here. This is a place filled with beings who know you to the depths of your soul and yet still desire your companionship, your presence. Stay here and we promise you will never again feel that no-one cares whether you stay or go. Just as Katherine finally found a home here, a _family_ , so have you. That is not a _small_ thing.”

No, Dean decided. That wasn’t a small thing at all.

A home.

A family.

Did it really matter if that family was a mismatched bunch of vacationing minor deities?

Not as much as it possibly should.

Fuck it.

Time to man up and go find a rabbit god.

###

The sun had long set before Dean found him.

By that time his perception of the whole world had changed yet again.

One by one, he had watched as nymphs materialized from their trees, casting off the yokes of their gnarled tree trunk homes, slipping off the bark like unwanted cloaks as they emerged butterfly-like from their winter cocoons.

Their naked, perfect flesh shimmering, as slim youths and maidens tip-toed barefoot over the forest floor, their wild hair tangled with leaves and budding vines, the soft petals of blossom sprouting like garlands through their verdant tresses. With sharp-toothed grins and savage laughter, they danced and span like moonbeams through a wood now bathed in the pale opaque glow of silvery moonlight.

Dean found himself jostled and spun as he was carried along in their midst, their arms linking with his as they dragged him inexorably forward and, though he was breathless, dazed and confused, barely able to keep pace with their raucous exuberance, there was no threat here. No clawing fingers this time. No roots rising to trip him, no trees moving to block his path, just these wild, primitive fae with their feral joy and ancient beauty, moving as a wave of frolicking woodsprites towards a vast circular glade carpeted by lush grass and dancing wildflowers.

Poppies and yarrow and ox-eye daisies and cornflowers, all impossibly in bloom, all swaying in time to a rhythm of silent music, bowing their heads to a bass that echoed the thudding of Dean’s heart.

The scene was totally silent. And yet Dean could ‘hear’ the pounding rhythm of distant drums, the tinkling sounds of a thousand bells, the whistling song of wind through reeds, and the glade was filled with hundreds of creatures, all swaying to that inaudible music.

A stag, as impossibly huge as a moose, white as the moon above, its antlers the vast, mossy magnificence of fall though this was the first hours of spring and, surely, his antlers should have already been shed.

A bear, black as night, eyes glowing scarlet, teeth and claws glinting like knives, and yet still Dean felt no sense of threat, of danger.

Wild boars danced with chickens, foxes played chase with cats, deer frolicked with chipmunks, and everywhere cotton-tailed rabbits and long-eared hares scampered and swayed and turned whirling pirouettes.

And in the very center of the glade, at least six foot tall, eyes blazing blue like an electric ocean, his chocolate brown ears flowing to the ground like the drape of a cloak or a pair of folded wings, stood the rabbit he’d named Huckleberry.

“Shit, I’m Jimmy Stewart,” Dean muttered helplessly

The rabbit twitched its whiskers, its huge blue eyes unfailingly meeting Dean’s despite the cacophony of silent music that should have drowned the words, and the creature opened its mouth, to reveal vast, white teeth and then it tipped its head back and laughed. The sound rich and pure and so fond that it felt like an embrace as its resonance filled the night air and wrapped Dean with its warmth.

And Huckleberry flickered and his chocolate fur faded to a pure white, his eyes flicked to pink, and he was a six-foot tall _white_ rabbit.

“Harvey,” Dean chuckled, amused despite his awe.

“If that is who you wish me to be,” Tu’er Shen replied, his voice as deep as a ravine, sonorous, full-bodied, as powerful as a storm. As gentle as a caress. “I can be anything you wish me to be.”

“Real,” Dean said, simply. “I think all I want is for you, for _this_ , to be real.”

“You believe you are dreaming?” the god asked.

“Difficult not to.”

“Forti et fideli nihil difficile,” Tu’er Shen said. “To the brave and faithful man nothing is difficult. It is the family motto of the Gaelic Clan of Dean. Co-incidental, yet appropriate, I believe.”

“I don’t feel brave,” Dean admitted. “I think I’m stunned. And still kinda sure I’m dreaming.”

“How can I help?”

“Stop being anything I ‘wish’ you to be. Show me who you _are_. Let my eyes see something my imagination can’t simply have cooked up for me.”

The rabbit blinked and then, as swiftly as it had changed color, its fur evaporated, its form slimmed and straightened, its eyes reverted to vibrant blue, and what stood before Dean was a man.

He was Dean’s height, give or take an inch. His hair a rich mahogany brown that looked almost black in the moonlight. His skin tan and sleek, curved over muscle and sinew. His torso finely defined but hairless. In fact except for the hair on his head, the only other hair he had was the heavy thatch at his groin that drew Dean’s eyes inexorably to the thick, turgid prominence of his cock.

“Is this form more satisfactory?” the god enquired, his head tilted inquisitively. “Easier for you to believe is not one simply sprung from your own imagination?”

Dean licked his lips unconsciously. “Um, not really, considering you just turned into every hot fantasy I’ve ever had,” he admitted.

The god looked stymied. “Oh,” he said, apologetically. “This is my usual personally preferred human form. I can devise another more to your specific liking if you prefer.”

“No,” Dean yelped. Then flushed. “I mean, um, don’t change on my account. Maybe… um… maybe some clothes though?” he suggested awkwardly, trying to keep his eyes averted although the treacherous bastards kept creeping back to the main prize.

The god blinked. “I have no perception of temperature. Clothes are not necessary for me.”

“Ah, um, cool,” Dean said, weakly. “Good to know. So, um, what do I call you?”

“I have many names. But I prefer the name Castiel.”

“Not Cassie?”

“No,” he frowned repressively.

“Cas?” Dean suggested cautiously.

The god frowned for a moment, then his expression cleared. “I did not formerly understand Loki’s insistence on the use of a diminutive but now I believe I understand. It is similar to how you began to call me ‘Huckster’ and ‘Hucks’. Diminutives are indications of endearment.”

“Um, kinda,” Dean admitted, his cheeks burning.

For a long moment, the god continued to stare at him, his blue gaze seeming to bore inside Dean’s head and eviscerate his every thought. Then slowly, as though the expression was totally unfamiliar, his lips twisted into a genuine smile.

“Hello, Dean. My name is Cas.”

“Hi Cas,” Dean replied weakly, forcing himself to keep his eyes firmly above Cas’s waist.

“Can we have sex now?” Cas asked.

Dean spluttered and choked. “WHAT?”

Cas blinked innocently. “It is the vernal equinox. Time for Winter to retire and Spring to ascend. Time to bring new life to the world. It’s the ritual, Dean. Why else do you believe we are all gathered here in this place at _this_ precise time?”

He gestured around them at the hundreds of animals and sprites and Demi-gods who were gathered watching them, seemingly devouring every word. “They are being very patient. They are too polite to start without us,” Cas confided. “And though, honestly, they are primarily motivated by the fact I am the god of this spring equinox, they obviously all respect you too in this matter. Being the chosen beloved of a god is not a small thing.”

Chosen beloved. Chosen beloved. The words tumbled through Dean’s head.

And yet….

“What makes you even think….ah… mind reader shit, huh?”

“You find me immensely sexually attractive,” Cas agreed, his tone matter-of-fact rather than proud. “And, conveniently, I feel the same way about you. Therefore, further conversation appears redundant at this time. The ritual, however, has somewhat of an urgency so, perhaps, we can discuss the details of our future relationship later?”

“Future relationship?” Dean repeated helplessly, even as Cas snapped the fingers of his right hand and Dean’s clothes simply disappeared, leaving him naked and exposed, revealing the absolute truth that his own cock was also hard and weeping with desire.

“Later,” the God muttered, gracefully sinking to his knees, opening his mouth and devouring Dean’s length inside wet heat.

And, even as that action seemed to flick a switch that caused all the denizens of the glen to erupt into their own furious couplings, Dean lost the ability to even pretend to protest his own manhandling.

As Cas used his mouth to tease orgasm after orgasm out of him, until he was weak and boneless and drained dry by Cas’s vociferous greed, as he remained standing only because of the impossibly strong hands bracing his buttocks, squeezing his globes, holding him in place as Cas drank and drank as though he were the font of life, Dean knew this was impossible. He was almost thirty years old. He couldn’t cum and cum and cum, endlessly and forever, his heart near exploding in his chest as his hips bucked and his hands clawed with wild desperation in Castiel’s thick chocolate hair.

Lights were bursting in front of his eyes, like a migraine aura, but there was no pain, no sense of danger; he was seeing stars, constellations, galaxies perhaps. Astral bodies flaring into life, exploding into darkness, as though time itself was the fluid Castiel was suctioning out of his cock, as though with every greedy mouthful, Cas was stealing the seeds with which to sow a whole new universe.

And around them, the grunts and groans of a thousand frolickers, gods, sprites, mortals, formed a chorus for Dean’s own chant of “yes, yes, yes, yes, YES,” as Castiel’s hands tightened on his buttocks and lifted him up off the ground, then eased him down slowly until he was lying on the soft meadow grass, his nose filled with the scent of flower petals, and though the hungry mouth never left his cock, Cas’s hands pressed against the inside of his thighs, forcing them apart, and then a finger probed at his asshole.

The finger was dry, blunt, pushing against him with a force that should have hurt. Yet, impossibly, he felt himself simply opening, his anus unfurling like a flower, his body sucking the digit inside with the same hungry greed with which Castiel had enveloped his own cock.

Magic, he thought wildly. It was all magic. Of course it was magic. He was being fucked by a goddamned GOD. 

A god who could read his mind, he thought, he hoped, because if Castiel sucked even one more drop from his spent abused cock he thought he might literally die. If Castiel didn’t replace the brutal stabbing of his blunt finger with his thick, long cock, Dean thought he’d _want_ to die.

Please. Please, please, please, he begged, silently, shamelessly, because he was burning, burning, burning, like one of the stars exploding in his vision and nothing would quench that need, that want, except the feel of the God driving inside him and replenishing him with life.

Cas released his cock, let it flop wet, reddened, spent, and raised his head to stare at Dean , his eyes burning wild, inhuman, ecstatic.

Dean shuddered with fear, with want, with need.

“Please,” he gasped, And from nowhere, words spilled into his head and he said, ”Bind him hard, bind him fast, throughout all time, this bind will last,” as he widened his legs and thrust his ass upwards in demand, even as the god finally thrust his hips forward and drove inside him.

Dean howled as he was filled by a cock so thick, so long, that it would surely rip him apart.

“You would bewitch me, little Wicca?” Cas grunted, as he withdrew, then slammed inside him again, and again, and again in a punishing rhythm that dragged scream after scream from Dean’s throat. “You would bind me to you forever? Drug me to be eternally enslaved by the pleasure of your greedy hole?”

“YES,” Dean screamed defiantly, impaled on the God’s cock, the pain, the agony, the pleasure thrumming through him like bolts of lightning. He was burning, breaking, exploding, and the pain was such it felt he might rip apart and yet he wanted more, and more and more and…

“So mote it be,” Cas agreed, cheerfully enough, and erupted inside him, flooding Dean’s inside with a lava stream of endless, white-hot cum. 

It filled his bowels, his stomach, then burst through his cell walls, charging through his bloodstream, flooding his heart, his lungs, his limbs. It poured from his mouth, spilled from his eyes like milky tears, broke from his pores like sweat until his whole body was soaked in white luminescence.

He felt every cell of his body tingling, changing, transforming.

“What have you done to me?” he gasped.

“Let you bind me,” Castiel laughed wildly, his eyes bright and joyous. “You are mine forever now, my own little _immortal_ witch.”

And, as though to prove the God’s claims, Dean’s savagely overused cock sprang back to life and nudged hopefully against Castiel’s leg.

“Greedy, greedy little witch,” the God chuckled fondly. “But the night is yet young, Dean. We still have many, _many_ more hours of ritual to go.”

###

He woke alone in Agnes’s four-poster bed.

The sun was high in the sky, pouring through the spotless glass of the window frame illuminating the bright floral wallpaper and the rich colors of the embroidered comforter. The whole room looked bright, fresh, new, and somehow he knew that the rest of the house probably looked the same.

Perfect.

Whole.

Healed.

Which was more than he could say for his ass. He felt as though he’d been spit-roasted for hours. Which, come to think of it, wasn’t that far from the mark.

Immortal or not, he thought the fact there were only two equinoxes a year was probably a good thing for his health.

“Don’t forget solstices. We celebrate those, too, on the island,” Cas said, walking naked into the room with a tray filled with breakfast goods, Nyx riding sprawled over his shoulders like a fur stole and Lolly padding at his heels.

Though the dog definitely looked more like a Timberwolf than Lassie now.

“You’re still human. I wasn’t sure whether you would be,” Dean admitted.

“I like spending most of my free time in my rabbit form,” Castiel agreed. “It’s remarkably relaxing. You should try it sometime, when you’re feeling less... delicate. Kathy spent much of her time as a chipmunk. But opposable thumbs sometimes have their advantages.” He carefully placed the tray down at Dean’s side, rather than on his lap, a consideration that Dean’s still sore cock appreciated greatly.

“But the naked thing is permanent?” Dean queried, reaching for a slice of buttered toast.

“Unless you have a specific objection,” Castiel agreed.

Dean chewed a piece of toast, swallowed it, then said, “Nuh huh. No objections here.” Then he winced as his abused cock twitched its enthusiastic agreement.

Nyx dropped off Castiel’s shoulders and sprawled on the foot of the bed lazily, now all naked blue limbs and long black hair. “Good,” Kali said. “Kathy was always a bit too Puritan for my tastes. I think you’re going to fit in here a lot better.” Then she transformed back into Nyx, curled up and went to sleep.

“Woah,” Dean said. “This gig is going to take some getting used to.”

“But,” Loki said, snapping to human form, “on the plus side… you’re still only an hour and a half from good pizza.”

“Point,” Dean agreed, even as Loki transformed back into Lolly, jumped up, and sprawled next to Nyx with a contented wuff.

Castiel bit his lower lip, then looked at Dean with huge, soulful eyes. “So you’ll stay?”

Outside the sun shone, birds twittered and tweeted.

Across the bay, a world waited. A world with no magic houses, no gods playing animal farm, and no trees that came to life and danced and fucked by moonlight. 

A _real_ world.

But _real_ was overrated.

“Of course I’ll stay, doofus. I bound you. You’re mine,” he said. “So get your furry ass back into bed.”

And he sat there, chewing toast, drinking coffee, eating the breakfast made for him by an actual god, as a blue-eyed, chocolate brown rabbit joined the lazy fur pile on the bottom of the bed, and he wondered what the fuck he’d ever done to deserve feeling so damned happy.

The End.

  
  


Notes: 

Katherine Harrison was a real person.

John Harrison, a landowner, died in 1666. He left his widow with three daughters and a small fortune. Katherine became one of the wealthiest women in the town of Wethersfield. Katherine Harrison made the unusual choice not to remarry. That proved her undoing. It was not ‘seemly’ for a woman to be independently wealthy. She became a figure of envy and soon the target of physical attacks. The livestock on her farm were set upon on numerous occasions, injured or even killed, yet when she applied to the local court for assistance, naming her neighbors as her attackers, the authorities forced her to retract her accusations and charged her with slander for having dared to bring the charges.

Found guilty, she was fined. Not satisfied, her neighbors brought further charges against her. In 1668, two years after John’s death, she was charged with, and found guilty of, witchcraft and sentenced to death.

Was she a witch? The evidence spoke to it. She was certainly renowned as a herbalist and healer. She was known to spin more cloth in a day than most women managed in a week - and that efficiency with a spindle was well-known to be the sign of a satanic pact - and it was said that she was a ‘bee-charmer’, able to enter the angriest hive without suffering a single sting.

Yet, even though Witches in Salem were burned or hung for another two decades after Katherine’s conviction, her own death sentence was mysteriously commuted. She was allowed to simply sign over her land to her neighbors, pay fines for her ‘wrongdoing’ to the court, and leave Wethersfield completely.

To anyone with a mind of logic, those facts supported her innocence. She was merely a victim of terrible envy, greed and misogyny. Yet, when she fled Wethersfield for Westchester, she was met with suspicion, distrust and fresh accusations of witchcraft. Yet again she was forced to give up her property and pay fines - and the fact her eldest daughter, Rebecca, became wed to the son of her primary accuser was possibly also a factor in her acquittal.

So Katherine Harrison left Westchester in 1672, and was rumored to have died around 1682 somewhere near Wethersfield, although no grave marker exists for her.

Rebecca, then married to Josiah Hunt of Westchester died in 1680 after giving birth to Caleb Hunt, who had a daughter named Rachel.

All of the above is true. The only artistic license I have taken is adding this genealogy to the story:

Caleb Hunt’s daughter, Rachel, married Caleb Campbell, son of a man named Nathaniel Campbell, who (canonically) arrived in the US from Scotland in the late 1600’s. The Campbell Project confirms that a Campbell family settled in Connecticut in the 1600’s. For the sake of this story, I have chosen to make that family Mary’s. Which is how, three hundred years later, it is a reasonable concept that one of Katherine’s descendants, Mary Campbell, married a man named John Winchester.

**Loki… the Wolf God**

Is not known for a wolf-form. He is, however, the father of Fenrir, the great wolf who will devour the world. I decided it was valid writer’s license to suggest the dad of a wolf would probably also choose to have a similar animal form.

According to Wikipedia… the source of all interesting (though not necessarily accurate) facts:

 **Tu’er Shen… the Rabbit God.**

Tu'er Shen (Chinese: 兔兒神, The Leveret Spirit) or Tu Shen (Chinese: 兔神, The Rabbit God), is a Chinese deity who manages the love and sex between homosexual people. His name literally means "rabbit deity".

In a folk tale from 17th century Fujian, a soldier is in love with a provincial official, and spies on him to see him naked. The official has the soldier tortured and killed, but he returns from the dead in the form of a leveret (a rabbit in its first year) in the dream of a village elder. The leveret demands that local men build a temple to him where they can burn incense in the interest of "affairs of men".

**Alectryon… the Chicken God**

In Greek mythology, Alectryon was a young soldier who was assigned by Ares to stand guard outside his door while the god indulged in illicit love with Aphrodite. He fell asleep on guard duty and the sun-god, Helios, discovered them the following morning. Helios then alerted Hephaestus, husband to Aphrodite, to the actions of the two, causing Hephaestus to create a net to ensnare and shame them. Furious, Ares punished Alectryon by turning him into a rooster which never forgets to announce the arrival of the sun in the morning by its crowing. He became the god of chickens and roosters therefore looking after all chickens and roosters for all eternity.

 **Ai-Apaec… the Peruvian Cat God**

A god of the pre-Inca civilization who was frequently represented as an aged man with a shrunken face, long tusks, and cat-like whiskers. He was also said to frequently inhabit the form of a fat gray tomcat

**El-ahrairah: A character from Watership Down by Richard Adams.**

A rabbit trickster folk hero. He represents what every rabbit wants to be: smart, devious, tricky, and devoted to the well-being of his warren. A complex folklore was created around him in both Watership Down and Tales from Watership Down. In Lapine, his name is a contraction of the phrase Elil-Hrair-Rah, meaning "prince with a thousand enemies".

  
  



End file.
